And it’s really unfortunate — politically, we’re probably more alike than different, and we need more outspoken liberal voices in atheism. But he has done the unforgivable: serial plagiarism, and when caught out, has apologized, but simultaneously belittled the seriousness of the offense and blamed it on a campaign by our little neo-conservative atheist cabal of Harris and Boghossian.
I agree that they are wrong about so much else, but when they’re right, they’re right, galling as it is. This is a situation that requires much more reflection and far greater amends than Werleman has given it. He has also effectively written himself out of any of the debates, internal or external, about atheism.
Unintentional plagiarism is bad and should be called out, but usually a forgivable offense. Intentional Plagiarism is dishonest, disrespectful, and anyone engaging it in should be thoroughly called out and discredited.
But…
There is this part of me that’s laughing and crying. Copy someone’s writing, and get kicked out of the movement. Rape a woman, and get invited back for even more speaking engagements.
It seems that priorities and definitions of ‘harm’ might be a little bit screwed up in this movement.
No “side” will be without its scandals. The important thing is how these scandals are dealt with. A similar thing happened with Johann Hari. When his dishonesty was discovered, he was criticised just as much by left-wing allies as by right-wing enemies.
I’m relieved. I thought you’d rather become a young earth creationist before acknowledging Harris being right on anything
Then maybe you should examine your own biases Claudio. Because that’s a fucking stupid statement.
@ Island Prepubescent: I’m sure PZ would just chuckle at my comment. Take it easy man.
Silly CJ.
But I will be interested to see the response to the allegations that Harris might also be guilty of plagiarism.
Yeah, Claudio. You’re an idiot. This is the standard approach to Revered Leaders: any criticisms of their position are treated as absolutist assaults on the entirety of their ideas, as a defensive tactic. Of course I agree with Harris on atheism and evolution. That doesn’t mean I have to stand silent on his illiberal and rather racist ideas.
#1: That’s an important point. Plagiarism is clearly regarded as a good reason to completely ostracize someone from the movement, and Boghossian and Harris are quite happy to kick Werleman out for it…but yeah, abusing women or casual sexism or advocating for war, those are minor issues and HOW DARE YOU BRING THEM UP.
Kind of ironic that he cribbed from Fareed Zakaria: http://ourbadmedia.wordpress.com/ (scroll past the first blog post about Tom Friedman for the Zakaria stuff).
#1 – my cynical response is: Of course, because plagiarism could actually happen to them – they are much more likely to have their ideas stolen than to be raped.
(“they”, of course, being the men who are so haughtily condemning the plagiarist whilst chiding those who criticize the harassers)
These days, plagiarism is incredibly easy to detect. It’s also incredibly easy to deflect. Just put these things “” around the text you want to copy, attribute those words to a person, and you’re good to go.
Passing someone else’s writing off as your own is a pretty shitty thing to do — but as far as I know, it’s not a crime of any sort.
Heck, when I was a workaday journalist, I can’t tell you how many times I’d have the local TV news on and hear my exact words from that day’s paper read aloud. No need to rephrase or recast, attribute it to me or my paper, or even do their own reporting — I was their unpaid intern, apparently (as was everyone else on staff).
I imagine that all of the copyright lawyers would beg to differ.
@12…Really? Copyright infringement is a crime? A CRIME!?!eleventy!!! Punishable by what? Flogging?
No. Copyright infringement is a tort, not a crime. Different things.
As Mark Twain once noted, the difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and lightning bug.
Ok – check forgery, then? You’re using someone else’s name and the way they write it, and i know that one’s definitely a felony. :)
Claudio
Deliberatly mis-naming someone is rude and condescending. Not funny.
Honestly? I’m not sure how slam-dunk this is, and here’s why: it seems to be conventional in some branches of journalism to draw from the work of others without citation. I first noticed this (I think) when reading a very long & very good article on Franz Boas in The New Yorker. It suddenly dawned on me that there were no citations at all. Obviously there had to be sources, but they weren’t cited – or there may have been one or two mentions just of names. It is apparently normal and accepted for magazine articles to dispense with proper citations, presumably on grounds of readability.
This can get irritating if you’re one of the sources. I’ve had that happen at least once – recognizing what was basically a chapter I wrote, with a very minimal citation. Jennifer Michael Hecht has always said this – with considerable heat – about Hitchens’s lifting of her work for god is not Great with very inadequate citation. Others have said the same about his Mother Teresa book.
So it’s possible – I don’t know, but it’s possible – that Salon and AlterNet don’t let authors do proper citations, but instead get them to paraphrase without attribution.
It’s a weird custom. I don’t like it. But as far as I can tell it is an actual custom in magazine journalism.
Wouldn’t an author who has some honesty and integrity at least mention the fact that they were using someone else’s words?
When I was in college, one of my classmates was caught plagiarizing and was failed in that course. Other professors then went back to other papers she had written, discovered large plagiarized sections, and she was kicked out of school. The rapists (they didn’t call it rape, of course — she was drunk and passed out, she eventually said yes, she kept saying no but her eyes said yes, she had an orgasm, so it wasn’t rape) stayed in school. And graduated. So WithinThisMind at #1 makes sense.
Found it. It’s this one:
http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/Additional%20Course%20Readings/annals_of_culture.pdf
It’s 16 pages. It’s fact-rich and interpretation-rich. It’s obviously based on sources, but there’s no knowing what most of them are, let alone which ones are behind which claims. And plenty of non-fiction books are written that way too – maybe with “Further Reading” at the end, or even a bibliography, but with no specific citations. That tends to be more pop history or science, but it’s apparently not considered any kind of plagiarism.
I read the examples of this guy’s plagiarism at Friendly Atheist (who linked to other articles that went into greater depth), it appeared more the result of laziness and sloppy writing than intentionally trying to claim the expressions as original thoughts. He had sighted the articles from which he drew the material in the body of the articles, he just didn’t attribute a few quotes; lazy and sloppy. I’m a criminal defense attorney, so I naturally defend the accused; but I have to say that labeling this guy’s actions as “unforgivable” is just too much. There are few acts that are truly unforgivable. Certainly his reputation and integrity has been tarnished, but he can rectify the situation, by taking accountability and being extremely diligent in his future writings. Also, the fact that he quoted others without giving them credit does not change the truth or veracity of what he said, it just means that we can’t believe that he came up with the thoughts on his own. (in the interest of full disclosure; I had never heard of this guy before I saw the FA article. I only interject, because I don’t like to see people vilified for a correctable offense. The idea of ostracizing this guy for not citing a handful of quotes, I believe, is unjust.)
Wrong on the second part, it’s a crime in some instances, See 17 USC §506. That said, plagiarism isn’t the same thing as copyright infringement.
Paraphrasing without citation is not plagiarism.
Copying a sentence and then changing a couple of words is not paraphrasing.
But of course, nothing that isn’t a crime sensu stricto is really all that wrong.
I read over the examples of supposed plagiarism very carefully and agree with Congaboy @20. Sloppy. Could be a copy editor’s fault (do they still have those?). Could be the result of cutting back on the number of characters to fit a space. What Ophelia says @16 is also very relevant. I have no particular sympathy for this C.J. Werleman person who I only heard of for the first time today but can we please stop witch hunting? May the person who has never sinned cast the first stone.
Are you accusing Harris & Boghossian of witch hunting? Horrors!
There’s a big difference between plagiarizing and paraphrasing. If it looks like you had to have the text open in front of you to transcribe most of it, it’s plagiarism, and it means you weren’t thinking. If you have a few phrases here and there that could have come from your memory of reading something, it’s paraphrasing.
It looks to me like Werleman took a few lazy shortcuts. If it were a student paper, it would be grounds for calling them into my office for a little talk, and possibly failing them.
Chimera,
Can we please stop calling criticism ‘witch hunting’? Not the same thing.
Alongside his “apology” he also accused Sam Harris of also being a plagiarist. He did this by promising to post a column about it. 2 days later a person named “Stephanie Cranson” joined twitter and created a blog with 2 accusations of plagiarism against Harris. Both of which turned out to be unfounded.
It is highly likely that “Stephanie Cranson” is simply a CJ Werleman sock puppet.
Self Destruction indeed.
I love me some PZ and have had the pleasure of meeting the man, but…I don’t understand why it’s “really unfortunate” that Werleman imploded. He’s been a dishonest hack for a long time. Did you read his and Sam Harris’ e-mail exchange from a year ago? The guy’s been incapable of being honest ever since he became a known quantity, so his taking this to a for formal level is no surprise.
http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/email-exchange-between-sam-harris-and-c.j.-werleman
If “we need more outspoken liberal voices in atheism,” surely there are plenty of such voices out there waiting to be heard that don’t emanate from the throats of shit-weasels.
I also think that saying, in reference to Harris and the other dude (with whom I’m unfamiliar) “when they’re right, they’re right, galling as it is” is useful. If someone says something productive, it seems pointless to raise the specter of other areas in which most atheists disagree with them. That, it seems to me, is certainly no recipe for “attracting more outspoken liberal voices” to the atheist “community” (i.e., leading them to think that we all have to agree on every last debatable point before any of us can be accepted as far-flung carriers of the god-free message).
Shorter version — S.H. said some ill-advised and sexist things but to continually and forever more tar him as a “neoconservative” even when he resumes saying agreeable things seems like poisoning the well, if I understand that term correctly.
“for formal” = “more formal” and my attempt to say that it shouldn’t be “galling” to point out the truth, regardless of the source, was a dismal failure.
#20 et al. — “it appeared more the result of laziness and sloppy writing than intentionally trying to claim the expressions as original thoughts.”
I think you need to catch up.
http://thedailybanter.com/2014/10/looks-like-salon-writer-critical-new-atheists-busted-plagiarism
And then, even more stark:
http://thedailybanter.com/2014/10/c-j-werlemans-pitiful-dishonesty-goes-beyond-plagiarism-allegations/
To suggest at this point that Werleman was simply sloppy is akin to saying that Ken Ham and the yammerheads at the Discovery Institute aren’t liars, they’re simply captive to their Christian beliefs and believe every insane and incorrect think that spills out of them. I understand people giving him the benefit of the doubt before access to more facts was possible, but those facts are now circulating and plain. Add this to Werleman’s existing record of assaults on integrity, and those who insist on keeping an overall tally might want to note that, normalizing for name recognition, this guy has done far more to damage the face of atheism (inasmuch as I even subscribe to that concept) than Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins.
CJ Werleman on twitter
“Starting to like religion’s whole forgiveness thing.”
Right. More like religion’s whole “I said I’m sorry! Doesn’t that mean everything just goes away now?” thing
Who?
Calling Harris a neocon is unfair. Then again,
“The same point can be made in the opposite direction: even a liberal like myself, enamored as I am of thinking in terms of harm and fairness, can readily see that my vision of the good life must be safeguarded from the aggressive tribalism of others. When I search my heart, I discover that I want to keep the barbarians beyond the city walls just as much as my conservative neighbors do, and I recognize that sacrifices of my own freedom may be warranted for this purpose. I expect that epiphanies of this sort could well multiply in the coming years. Just imagine, for instance, how liberals might be disposed to think about the threat of Islam after an incident of nuclear terrorism. Liberal hankering for happiness and freedom might one day produce some very strident calls for stricter laws and tribal loyalty. Will this mean that liberals have become religious conservatives pining for the beehive? Or is the liberal notion of avoiding harm flexible enough to encompass the need for order and differences between in-group and out-group?” (Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape, p62)
Ah, the paranoia in black and white. Dismissed.
CJ may be a big plagiarist, but branding Sam Harris the Pat Robertson of atheism was closer to the mark than he realised
““Our own religious demagogues, the fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, will call a spade a spade and observe that there is a link between Islam and the kind of violence we see in the Muslim world. While I don’t agree with these people on anything else, they are actually offering a much more candid and accurate diagnosis of the problem, vis-à-vis Islam, than anything that’s coming from the Left”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/page3/20060403_sam_harris_interview1
Thanks Dereksmear, showing the paranoia of SH…
Ohhh be careful folk. The fact that the first example comes from a plagiarist should be a clue.
Thing is that journalism is not like the academic literature which is also a racket but in a totally different way. Lots of authors produce stuff that is intended to be copied and passed off under the journalist’s byline. Any material in a PR release is fair game for copying verbatim.
If we are going to get excited about plagiarism, lets hear some folk complaining about their work being plagiarized before we call for Mr Pierrepoint.
Or do you mean Mr. Pulitzer?
I see that “Alternet” has cleaned their house of his articles:
http://www.alternet.org/special-note-readers-alternet-regrets-authors-plagiarism
“If we are going to get excited about plagiarism, lets hear some folk complaining about their work being plagiarized before we call for Mr Pierrepoint.”
Excellent point. Until the authors whose work Werleman has shamelessly stolen come forward publicly to condemn him, there’s no point in us making a fuss about it or about Werleman’s even more unhinged and dishonest behavior in the aftermath of being caught. Instead, we need to keep the focus squarely on what a paranoiac Sam Harris is for suggesting that radical Islam is a very real threat as well as for predicting the reactions of a lot of liberals to given events. Indeed, the fact that Harris has said some questionable things implies, ipso facto, that his and anyone’s criticism of Werleman is unfounded or at least overblown.
@ kevinbeck
This is so wrong I can’t believe I’m reading it on a “rationalist” forum. Sam Harris has been wrong on certain issues, but that doesn’t mean everything he says is unfounded, particularly when it’s backed up by examples.
@ nrdo:
I should have laid on the sarcasm more thickly, but that usually gets me in hot water. ;o) I actually think that Harris has become far more of a pariah than he deserves to be in some circles, and I certainly don’t think that anyone should find it troubling when he’s in the right, as if the comments he’s made that most atheists and liberals find controversial render him forevermore someone who doesn’t deserve credit for producing rational and honest thoughts. There are also a lot of people who take the piss out of him based on out-of-context quote excerpts and never bother going to his blog for the full explanation — sound like all-too-familiar behavior? It does to me — it’s like something straight out of a creationist Wiki.
kevinbeck @ #42
I don’t. I usually ignore him. I wonder if anyone else just doesn’t care that much about Harris until he’s brought up? And, then, finds it inconsequential when he’s said something ‘right’ because the wrong things he says are vastly more important (when he’s being paid any attention in the first place) and rather damning?
I do think he should be a pariah because of the things he’s said. Everywhere. He’s not my ally, he doesn’t represent my movement and he doesn’t represent me. I’m not obligated to acknowledge him or the things he says and he most certainly doesn’t deserve credit merely because he’s produced something rational and honest; Sam Harris is not unique in being capable of being rational or honest (even sometimes).
Oh, please! Would you care to quote or cite such an example? Nebulous lots of people are not upset with him because of out of context quotes. Many actual people are because he’s, at least, a damned racist.
You know, it’s rather rich that you think a plagiarist is more damaging to the face of atheism (I can only imagine how much you ‘subscribe to that concept’, or what rhetorical point you think you’re making with such a statement) than Richard Dawkins. Perhaps I don’t know enough about Werleman, but I don’t recall him having repeated public tantrums when he’s called out for making, at best problematic, statements about sexism, paedophilia and a range of other sensitive topics before reducing himself to the apparent mindset of a 6 year old and penning inane gems like this,
and endorsing just about the most public anti-feminist extant.
I won’t put words into your mouth, but I’d not be surprised if you next tell us that you can’t believe the deep rifts we’ve caused due to our ire towards rapists and sexual abusers in the atheist movement and how much worse Werleman is than them, because they’re sometimes right too and plagiarism is just so much worse. But, please, do surprise me.
Thomathy @ #43
“I won’t put words into your mouth…”
Why not? You already have, or at least pretended to be a mind-reader. For example:
“[Y]ou think a plagiarist is more damaging to the face of atheism than Richard Dawkins.”
You admit that “Perhaps I don’t know enough about Werleman.” Obviously this is the case, or else you would know that this latest example of bad acting on his part is just one in a long line of calculated bouts of dishonesty on Werleman’s part, several of them aimed at other atheists and not just Sam Harris. We can quibble all day about what’s worse — Dawkins’ presumed anti-feminism or minimization of the horrors of rape, or a guy claiming to be an atheist who makes every effort to publicly make well-known atheists look wrong or bad — but for what it is worth, I wasn’t damning Werleman for his plagiarism alone, no more than I would call G.W. Bush a shitty president because he was not a composed public speaker and cited God too often. The plagiarism is merely indicative of a deeply ingrained pattern. And if you think Dawkins has thrown some tantrums and acted like a young child, please refer to Werleman’s ongoing meltdown(s) for a much more stark example of this.
Kevinbeck, can you please learn how to use blockquotes?
See VI. Courtesies for how to use the blockquote function and then actually use it. Please.
_____
kevinbeck @ #44
Really, kevinbeck (@ #44), you actually did say that you think a plagiarist is worse than Richard Dawkins, in the context of damage to atheism.
kevinbeck @ #29
I bolded the relevant part. Are you a liar or do you have a very short memory for your own words?
Oh, it’s definitely the case. But, then, the rhetorical point I was driving was that unless he’s done worse than Dawkins in minimizing rape and definitely being anti-feminist, then he’s not worse than Dawkins.
Okay, he’s a child too. When he pulls a ‘Dear Muslima’ or becomes blatantly anti-feminist or descends into vile racism, he’ll be on level with Dawkins and Harris. Until then, he’s a plagiarist, prominent to some, who’s been made a pariah by, in absurd irony, the likes of Harris.
You’re welcome to continue to argue about how bad he is, indeed how much worse he is than Dawkins or Harris, but I can’t see that getting traction here. Where Werleman gets ousted due to his plagiarism (sorry, ‘deeply ingrained pattern’), we must continue to engage with the likes of Dawkins and Harris as well as those who would harbour rapists and sexual abusers and those same people themselves. The response to Werleman is fantastically disproportionate considering what horrors are overlooked that cause Deep Rifts.
Also, kevinbeck, I’m interested in why it is that you have couched in doubt the very public anti-feminism (downright misogyny, some would say), of Richard Dawkins.
I would also like you to respond to a substantive point in my previous post, if you would:
Kevinbeck @ #42
Oh, please! Would you care to quote or cite such an example? Nebulous lots of people are not upset with him because of out of context quotes. Many actual people are because he’s, at least, a damned racist.
Thomathy @ 45
I wrote: “[T]his guy has done far more to damage the face of atheism (inasmuch as I even subscribe to that concept) than Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins.”
You responded: “[Y]ou think a plagiarist is more damaging to the face of atheism than Richard Dawkins.”
I then replied: “[T]his latest example of bad acting on [Werleman’s] part is just one in a long line of calculated bouts of dishonesty on Werleman’s part, several of them aimed at other atheists and not just Sam Harris … I wasn’t damning Werleman for his plagiarism alone.”
Your reply: “Really, kevinbeck, you actually did say that you think a plagiarist is worse than Richard Dawkins, in the context of damage to atheism.”
Obviously my attempts to clarify why I think Werleman is so bad are not working here, most likely not because you can’t read simple sentences but because what you probably see as me trivializing the racist or sexist statements of Dawkins and Harris annoys you. I can understand why this would be the case, and it was wrong on my part to appoint myself the unilateral judge of what is and is not the worst thing for atheists to do or say publicly.
My points are simply these:
1. Werleman is undeniably a fucking weasel of longstanding quite apart from his plagiarism; and
2. I always balk at grudging acknowledgments that someone is right about anything. You don’t like Sam Harris’ comments about women and Islam? That’s fine, but to use this as justification for dismissing whatever else he has to say sounds a lot like creationists who use Darwin”s own racist and sexist views as justification for saying he shouldn’t’ be taken seriously when it comes to evolution.
And I always fuck up the blockquote, so no, I won’t use it. ;o)
Thomathy @ #46
“Oh, please! Would you care to quote or cite such an example? Nebulous lots of people are not upset with him because of out of context quotes. Many actual people are because he’s, at least, a damned racist.”
No, actually, I won’t. For one thing it’s incumbent on you to provide a Sam Harris quote you think is racist, since you say that he’s a racist, and then I might see what he’s had to say about it. For another, Sam Harris doesn’t interest you anyway. For a third I told you where on the Web to find him and pretty much every recent post he’s made deals with someone misrepresenting him. This is as far as I will go in spoon-feeding someone with a hard-on for a particular individual, and if at this point you want to claim some dubious “victory” because I refuse to both dig up direct quotes establishing Sam Harris as a racist or sexist and offer you his rebuttal, that’s fine.
kevinbeck #47:
Try this.
kevinbeck #47:
Okay. Sam Harris is right when he says there is no god. Religion is a bad idea; he’s right about that too. Great. He spotted the blindingly obvious. Give the man a fucking medal.
kevinbeck @ #47. Well, that’s well.
On point 2, in your post, there’s a fine line and I know you know the difference between what I said I do with regards to Harris and what creationist do with regards to Darwin. I know this because you can read simple sentences too.
I don’t give Harris grudging anything. I’d prefer to ignore him until the next damnable thing he says gets the spotlight. Creationists are doing something substantially different when they attempt to connect Darwin’s racism to evolution in an attempt to justify their agenda.
I don’t think that’s a good analogy to draw, kevinbeck, unless you can make a direct comparison between the two behaviours, because they’re substantively different.
And I think that’s probably all I have to say on that subject, to be terse.
Kevinbeck, it is not incumbent on me to show that Sam Harris is a racist. That has been done time and time again, even here on this very blog. You made the claim that he is taken out of context on matters where people see him as racist. You started that particular discussion. I know perfectly well where to find him online. And I certainly do not have a hard-on for Sam Harris. It’s even funny that you think I do, as though I constantly go on and on about him and he’s the only person I ever talk about. This conversation concerns him, of course he’s a person I’ll refer to. Also, I’m not asking you to spoon-feed me and I’ll thank you to quit with that patronising fuckery.
I’m not going to claim a victory on something I know quite well already. I do believe you are being disingenuous.
Daz: Keeper of the Hairy-Eared Dwarf Lemur of Atheism @ #50
“Sam Harris is right when he says there is no god. Religion is a bad idea; he’s right about that too. Great. He spotted the blindingly obvious. Give the man a fucking medal.”
Right you are — that’s not a stunningly stupid caricature of Harris’ body of work or anything, including his various books that don’t touch gender- or race-related issues at all; it’s all anyone needs to know about him! Just like P.Z. has never contributed anything other than savage mockery of gamers and desecrating communion wafers, and Dawkins’ whole career is founded on “God doesn’t exist and rape is trivial.”
Thomathy @ #52
“[I]t is not incumbent on me to show that Sam Harris is a racist. That has been done time and time again, even here on this very blog.”
Now I get it. Not only are you courageously incapable of making simple distinctions (e.g., Werleman-as-plagiarist vs. Werleman-as-comprehensive asshole) without a lot of prodding, you’re actually going to suggest that you can just stipulate that Harris is a racist because everyone establishing this “has been done time and time again, even here on this very blog” (and by the way, even if I read this blog more than once every week or two, it would still be good form for you, ya know, provide an example), yet at the same time you are demanding that I provide a specific instance in which Harris has said something that someone has then misrepresented, with Harris ultimately taking to his blog to address the misrepresentation of his views.
You sound exactly like any number of Christians, who, in response to being asked for evidence supporting the resurrection or any of their other treasured nonsense, just dismiss the challenge by saying, “That’s been asked and answered” while going on about how evolution has never been observed, violates the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. etc.
“I do believe you are being disingenuous.”
Of course you do — because you’re being an intellectually dishonest hypocrite.
I was going to link to a couple of posts by Harris in which he specifically states how his words were twisted and where people have flat-out lied about what he has said or done (as with Werleman’s frivolously accusing him of plagiarism) but there is plainly no point, no point at all, in doing that because you have effectively legislated anything he says or writes into the realm of bullshit or worse. You are unquestionably entrenched in your views of him, well-founded and otherwise, and anything I say just results in your digging in your heels even deeper. So like you, I believe it’s time to withdraw — now I remember why, despite how much I enjoy P.Z.’s posts themselves, I’m usually careful not to read far into the comment sections, if at all.
Sam Harris displaying his racism:
(bolding mine)
kevinbeck #53:
You’re right. It’s not. I’ve not read a thing from Harris on religion that I hadn’t worked out by the time I was fifteen fucking years old. And no, I don’t consider myself an intellectual heavyweight.
It promotes wooly thinking? Yeah. There’s some nasty shit in the OT that Christians try to pretend isn’t there or is negated by the New. Yeah, got that. People do nasty shit in the name of non-existent beings? Yep got that too. There’s nasty stuff in the Qur’an too? Yep. Obedience ≠ morality? Yeah, I even worked out that blinding-obviosity.
The man’s a joke: he jumped on a bandwagon just at the right time and got lucky.
And please, learn to bloody blockquote. It’s only twenty-three characters. I’m sure you can manage if you bother.
Tony! The Queer Shoop @ 54:
Yes, I have always found that to be a troubling statement as well. A kind of meta-problem I have with it is the more recent insistence (post-Ben Affleck on Bill Maher’s show) that criticizing Islam or Muslims is “racist” when there are Muslims from so many different ethnic backgrounds. Do people claim that criticizing U.S. Christians is skin to belittling white people? (Absurdly, I’ve actually heard a few people express this, but thankfully few.) I don’t like anyone’s use of “we” as Harris uses it here, either — please don’t tell me what “we” should do based on *your* opinions, even those I agree with. Anyway, thank you for posting the quote and the passage and not just flinging around vitriolic sentiments.
Daz: Keeper of the Hairy-Eared Dwarf Lemur of Atheism @ 55:
“I’ve not read a thing from Harris on religion that I hadn’t worked out by the time I was fifteen fucking years old”
See the italicized part? There’s a reason I mentioned Harris’ “body of work” because much, perhaps even most, of what has appeared in his books doesn’t concern religion directly or even indirectly — it concerns ideas and beliefs and thee processes by which we arrive at them. Lying, The Moral Landscape and Free Will are not about religion, and II have not read his new book on spirituality so I can’t really comment on it other than to note that, from what I understand, it’s not primarily and perhaps not even tangentially about faith-bashing. Waking all of this into account, I wonder how fair it would be for anyone who’s upset about Harris’ comments about Muslims and women to forevermore append “….even though he’s a bigoted slob” to every last idea he expresses that the observer actually finds palatable or appealing. It’s petty and pointless and divisive. And I’m not addressing you with this last bit, but any defense of Werleman at this point is hopelessly ignorant in the purest and most intensive sense of the word. He’s a serial liar and quite shameless and pathetic about it and I almost hope he has either drunkenness or frank mental illness to blame for it, because otherwise he must be devoid of a conscience.
Kevin, if you ask the majority of people here in the united states what a “muslim” looks like, they’ll answer middle-eastern, or brown. Because society has this racist view that all muslims are brown people. THAT is what Sam Harris is saying in that quote. That we need to stop all brown, brown-ish, and maybe black, chocolate, sepia, etc people. But not white people. Because muslims, in Sam-Harris-Land are brown, which is why he thinks it’s even remotely possible to profile them.
It is point blank racist, and saying it to be anything else either makes you an idiot, or a holder of racist though patterns.
Do my eyes deceive me? I am seeing the Courtier’s Reply right now, for the entire collective writings of Sam Harris? Atheists just continue to impress me.
kevin:
Sam Harris and his ilk show exactly why criticism of Muslims is taken as “racist”: Because idiots like them presume that they have common racial characteristics! They conflate Muslim and Arab. Even when they are looking at just the religious iconography, they display their racism. They will even conflate all Middle Eastern religions with Muslim, often confusing them with Sikhs, Jains, or even Hindus.
There is profound ignorance all around on the subject of Muslims, and it all seems to revolve around Africa = Muslim. There are the right-wingers who think Obama is a Muslim who came from Kenya. Most right-wingers like to conflate Muslim and radical Islam and conflate radical Islam with terrorism. Most right-wingers are blindly pro-Israel and speak of Palestinians like they speak of terrorists. We have a political discourse in this country where Muslim might as well mean Ork, for all the nuance and humanity that term denotes when spewing from the mouth of the average reactionary. If you believe for one moment that their skin color and their residing in the Middle East doesn’t factor into the spittle flecks sent forth every time the word is used, you are deluding yourself. Ditto if you think the most people talking Muslims in this fashion are currently acknowledging even the possibility of white Muslims, let alone being aware of the fact that the majority of Muslims are from Pacific Island nations.
This is the context in which Sam Harris chimes in with talk of “profiling” Muslims. This is the context in which you defend Sam Harris and bleat about this kind of blind ignorance not “technically” being racism. If you are actually honest, this is something to contemplate. Something to make you step back and stop digging for a moment. If you are not honest, you will do what every other apologist like you does: spin whatever you can spin, willfully ignore whatever is inconvenient. Pleasantly surprise me and take option one.
Sigh. You’re gonna be the type that tone trolls and dismisses valid arguments because they also contain strong wording and/or swears, aren’t you?
kevinbeck #56:
Oh Jebus, a nitpicker. Okay, Of the stuff I’ve read of his that intersected with subjects I actually give a damn about reading about, I’ve found him to be either stating the childishly obvious or flat out wrong. The flat out wrong parts I find, too often, to be wrong in ways which lead me to think the bloke’s a fucking arse. Why the hell, then, should I bother reading anything else by him? If he ever writes a book on his actual field of expertise—neuroscience—then I might be persuaded to change that stance.
Ah yes, The Moral Landscape, the book that’s not about religion but in which he manages to misrepresent, Daily Mail-fashion, a poll of Muslims, stating that it shows that just over a third of all British Muslims think apostates should be put to death.
Hey, if you find a passage, a sentence from any source, be it Mein Kampf, the Bible, or Pete’s Dragon, which, stripped from the context, and disregarding the author’s other views, sparks good ideas in your own mind, go with it. I’d advise you to be aware and careful of that context, but a good idea is a good idea regardless of source. Just don’t offer me one nice passage from Diary Of A Serial Killer, or whatever, with a recommendation that I should read anything else they wrote. Harris is an arse. He’s always been an arse. And frankly, I can think of better ways to spend my hard-earned than to drop it into the pockets of arses on the off-chance that this book won’t be as full of arse-gas as their previous work.
Pointing out that a poisonous, bigoted arsehole is a poisonous, biggoted arsehole is not petty. It may be—probably is—divisive, but this assumption that divisiveness is necessarily bad is not only unfounded but factually wrong. Unless, of course, you want to claim that those pesky divisive atheists should just shut up, quit being divisive and stop rocking the societal boat…?
#58 @ anteprepro:
“Do my eyes deceive me? I am seeing the Courtier’s Reply right now, for the entire collective writings of Sam Harris? “
As much as people surely love to reach far into their asses to use that term in comments on this blog, you are not even close. Yes, I like a lot of what Harris has written apart from religion. But for you to sit here and imply that I’m saying, “A deeper reading of anything Harris has written will show that it’s not what you think it is!” or label me an apologist for his racist statements merely because I challenged the rather prickly Thomathy to be consistent is blatantly dishonest.
I should be more emphatic. Thomathy was in a snit up there because Harris is such a piece of shit and a sexist and a racist and so on (and Thomathy spent some time yammering about Dawkins as well) that I merely became curious about what he saw as Harris’ worst acting in this area. I actually thought he’d at least mention Harris’ flat-out racist statement about TSA profiling (and I never once said anything in defense of Harris when it comes to racism, as you and others are reporting; all I asked was to see what those who criticize him globally were most upset about, because of recent events that have involved dishonesty among his many interlocutors) but he didn’t, and he wouldn’t say anything specific, he would only stipulate. A different commenter ultimately stepped in to rehash Harris’ jarring comments about profiling….and now this equally assumption-laden, wondrously condescending bullshit from you.
“Sam Harris and his ilk show exactly why criticism of Muslims is taken as ‘racist’: Because idiots like them presume that they have common racial characteristics!”
“His ilk” being people like Ben Affleck? I agree that unapologetically racist statements saying that anyone who so much as “looks Muslim” should be profiled — Harris knew better than to write this but did it anyway — fuels the ignorance of the average person who doesn’t know better. The fact is that there are a lot of people, many of them who have never heard of Sam Harris or other prominent atheists, who insist that criticism of Islam itself is synonymous with criticism of Muslims, including people like Affleck, whose overall visibility and influence is arguably stronger than PZ’s will ever be. For that it’s worth, I don’t believe for a second that the fact that criticizing Islam is not racist means that plainly racist statements by those same critics are at all okay.
Does this help at all? I’m rushed, so maybe not. I’m just tired of people who are obviously eager to guard this place from trolls and stealth racists or gamer fucks or whatever jumping to put words in my mouth. Arguing that Harris has said more than “God doesn’t exist” and augment this with bigoted nonsense is not akin to supporting every word he has said. I don’t stand behind everything any of the many “productive” atheists I enjoy reading have said — Hitch, Dawkins, PZ himself and others. And here, I don’t think that when someone has acted like as much of a fifth-degree shitbird as Werleman has that it’s useful to portray his implosion as unfortunate (which it’s not, because he has clearly always been a threat to rationalism) or say how “galling” it is that Harris was right in defending himself against very serious lies from Werleman. Just throw the facts and links out there rather than pour gasoline on the story from the outset (fun as that can be, I know).
“They conflate Muslim and Arab… “
You are preaching to the choir with this paragraph, believe me.
Final word — “tone troll”? I’m probably the last motherfucker here who will be rattled by profanity or claim that it devalues otherwise useful arguments.
Really, I didn’t want this to be all about my opinion(s) of Sam Harris; I know this blog moves at light speed but it’s disappointing that more people haven’t chimed in to acknowledge what an utter turd Werleman is. He had some real defenders up there. ^^^
OK, hopefully this time my unsubscribing to this topic will take, because a few more hours in here and I’ll miss some deadlines and be on the dole and chaos and darkness will ensue.