It used to be that I’d only get ranty, incoherent, ill-informed email from devout Christians. I guess we’ve won and converted them all to ranty, incoherent, ill-informed atheists now. Victory!
You are a stalker
Why do u continue to stalk Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and shermer and other NA.[Define “stalk”. You seem to think it synonymous with “criticize”. Does that mean you’re stalking me?] You vermin. You are obsessed. Just leave these people alone. [meme?] You have target. You really think you are smarter then a PhD in neuroscience.[All bow down before the Ph.D. in Neuroscience] Sam Harris is like really really smart [who else is
like really, really smart?], you couldn’t get a PhD in that field.[I don’t know why I find that amusing]You side with irrational blue hair women [More accurately, I don’t use hair color as a criterion for deciding who I side with]. Hysterically pathetic “girls” not women [I knew there’d be misogyny in here — there always is]. Sam is more of a man than you’ll ever be. [Oh. Degrees of manhood — so he’s agreeing that gender is not binary?] That’s logic [I missed the logic bit there]. Where suppose to trust a buzzfeed journalist. A retart could get a degree in journalism.[A journalist would know to spell and use proper grammar] Only the top 1 percent get into neuroscience. [Source? Top 1% of what?] You wonder why majority of people choose Harris over your inquisition [Source?]. A Harvard graduate vs were did you get your degree from a community college. [University of Oregon, Institute of Neuroscience, 1985] Hahahah. Lawrence a mit grad. You really think an mit grad is a rapist? [Impossible. No rapes ever occur at MIT. Also, I don’t think anyone has accused Krauss of rape. Why do you bring it up?] We will win this war.[With your logic?] Notice how na movement is a hundred times bigger than your movement.[What is “my” movement? I wish I knew. Also…Source?] I wonder why?[Because you just made up a number?] Hmmmmmm. #loser [I am crushed. You are #winning!]
You have target.
It is kind of sad to think that somebody sat down to type this and send this and probably feel like he (I’m going out on a limp here supposing the author is a he) probably thought he showed you.
I love it when people use “retart”, it brings up the oddest visuals in my head. Perhaps someone should let #Winner know that Ms. Watson’s hair is not blue. Damn those atheist women, changing their feminist hair around!
Giliell:
I know, a typo…hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. hee.
Actually, I always misunderstood the idiom.
So I have to thank Mr e-mail writer, I just learned something new!
Harris is a graduate of Stanford (BA) and UCLA (PhD), not almighty Harvard.
I’m guessing = new athiest.
“movement” always makes me think of the bowel kind.
How did you clean all the accompanying spittle out of your computer?
Well, when one does go out on a limb, one certainly could wind up going out with a limp.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
It always made me feel bad that I had not gone to college. This guy makes me feel like a freaking genius. Maybe having a high school education, when you’ve actually, you know, gone to high school, isn’t as bad as I thought.
While, it certainly isn’t Narcotics Anonymous, or Sodium. The mildly deranged penguin was guessing “nattily attired”, albeit she was grooming her tuxedo at the time, so was hard to understand and perhaps meant “noxious arseholes”?
Among many pernicious things here is the strange defense that he has this degree, he’s smart. The Caplan topic was pulling in that direction too. Do people not get that being smart doesn’t make you right? Being smart makes it a bit easier to do the necessary work it takes to find a right answer, but it’s doing the work that counts, and unfortunately recognition for being smart seems to keep people from bothering.
MIT has a thriving ‘Greek’ ‘culture’ and all the problems that go with it.
That email is so stupid and childish I’m tempted to call poe. Or it might literally be written by an actual child. Does Trump send emails?
Monad:
It’s a tad deeper. There’s an autoassumption that getting a degree is superdupercrazy difficult, so only this and that ‘genius’ could have managed. It shows a depressing lack of knowledge about school in general.
No, and if you were literate in American Politics, you would know that. He only Tweets his assholishness.
their ideology makes my skin crawL but their grammar is like fingernails on a blackboard
and their vituperation. these are some angry bigots
I feel terribly sad for this guy. Overgeneralizing a little bit, I would say many of their supporters are like him; they are pathetic, unaccomplished and looking for a “higher power” to cling to and feel strong and relevant. And surprise when you attack them, you have insulted their Gods
Retart (n). The second tart, which you shouldn’t eat because you should have impulse control, but the first tart was *so good*.
Retart (v). The act of eating the second tart. Even though you know you shouldn’t.
The mildly deranged penguin says most people are probably pronouncing “retart” as “reTART”. Silly long pigs. It is really pronounced the same as its two constituent words, “ret art”, making the meaning clearerer: Either art about retting, or art made with linen. Flax, used to make linen, is soaked to separate the fibres from the woody stems, a process calling retting.
PZ, I hope you will forward this to Shermer and Harris, so they are aware of the quality of their supporters. I’m sure it’ll warm the cockles of their scaly black hearts to know that this paragon of eloquence has their back.
Well, my PhD is in Neuroscience, so can I criticize Sam Harris? Despite being told repeatedly that torture and profiling doesn’t work by experts in the field, he still thinks there are reasons to do both of these to muslims. So much for his alleged rationality. That sounds more like fear talking than logic. As for Shermer, I’ve always thought he was a jerk, even before all the allegations about him. But, I don’t believe the accusations against him because a bunch of SJWs are after him, I believe them because James Randi said he’d received multiple, credible complaints against him. That he decided not to do anything about it because “that’s what men do when they drink”, just makes me think a lot less of Randi than I used to.
I hope it is OK to post links. I have been hunkered down for a long time – so plead “out of the loop if not.” I was reading this article this morning – and seemed relevant to this email – https://www.alternet.org/gender/atheists-metoo-might-be-too-little-too-late
It really does seem that atheism and our higher nature are not as connected as I thought they would be.
I have a PhD in Neuroscience, too. Colour me unimpressed by the lone fact that someone else managed to do the same 🙄
Possible Poe. Or if an avid Harris fan its level of discourse is incidental. Does Harris attract people incapable of constructing a well argued and worded email. Or does following Harris result in some isolated suspension tank knuckledragging atavism? I know after struggling to listen through any 2hr+ podcast I revert to some distant ancestral state with drool and mouth froth. Maybe that’s it. A post podcast hypnopompic state generated subconscious hero archetypal induced email.
After suffering hours of Alex Jones on Rogan because this blog I am surprised I didn’t enter loin cloth primal hunter berserker mode.
Mental note: limit podcast listening below 45 minutes per day and apologize to neighbors for converting their oak tree into a canoe.
Just to be clear, I believed the women who accused Shermer before Randi confirmed it. Upon review, I may not have made that as clear as I could.
The random crack at BuzzFeed’s journalism amused me, because BuzzFeed appear to have a pretty decent news operation, subsidised by the clickbait. They got access to Milo’s email archives and proved that Breitbart used him to launder white nationalist opinions. Their most recent story is an exhaustively researched expose of hundreds of dirty and abusive cops in the NYPD being protected by the force, their union, and a law prohibiting the public from seeing the records of police officers. BuzzFeed News wouldn’t have the reputation they’ve garnered if they didn’t run down stories properly and do due diligence.
Real old fashioned gods smite, atheist thinky leaders only spite.
Wow, that was really, really bad kid. #EmbarrassedForYou
Actually that sort of ‘folk’ pronunciation spelling is extremely useful to historical linguists.
In hundreds of years scholars will use correspondence of this sort to develop an understanding of AUTE (American Uneducated Twit English)!
Always supposing they want to.
BTW ‘retart’: I suppose this to be the low slang ‘retard’, and to be an interesting example of the American voicing of the alveolar plosive in a terminal position.
Actually that sort of ‘folk’ pronunciation spelling is extremely useful to historical linguists.
In hundreds of years scholars will use correspondence of this sort to develop an understanding of AUTE (American Uneducated Twit English)!
Always supposing they want to.
BTW ‘retart’: I suppose this to be the low slang ‘retard’, and to be an interesting example of the American voicing of the alveolar plosive in a terminal position.
Actually that sort of ‘folk’ pronunciation spelling is extremely useful to historical linguists.
In hundreds of years scholars will use correspondence of this sort to develop an understanding of AUTE (American Uneducated Twit English)!
Always supposing they want to.
BTW ‘retart’: I suppose this to be the low slang ‘retard’, and to be an interesting example of the American voicing of the alveolar plosive in a terminal position.
Actually that sort of ‘folk’ pronunciation spelling is extremely useful to historical linguists.
In hundreds of years scholars will use correspondence of this sort to develop an understanding of AUTE (American Uneducated Twit English)!
Always supposing they want to.
BTW ‘retart’: I suppose this to be the low slang ‘retard’, and to be an interesting example of the American voicing of the alveolar plosive in a terminal position.
Actually that sort of ‘folk’ pronunciation spelling is extremely useful to historical linguists.
In hundreds of years scholars will use correspondence of this sort to develop an understanding of AUTE (American Uneducated Twit English)!
Always supposing they want to.
BTW ‘retart’: I suppose this to be the low slang ‘retard’, and to be an interesting example of the American voicing of the alveolar plosive in a terminal position.
Actually that sort of ‘folk’ pronunciation spelling is extremely useful to historical linguists.
In hundreds of years scholars will use correspondence of this sort to develop an understanding of AUIE (American Uneducated Idiot English)!
Always supposing they want to.
BTW ‘retart’: I suppose this to be the low slang ‘retard’, and to be an interesting example of the American voicing of the alveolar plosive in a terminal position.
Actually that sort of ‘folk’ pronunciation spelling is extremely useful to historical linguists.
In hundreds of years scholars will use correspondence of this sort to develop an understanding of AUTE (American Uneducated Twit English)!
Always supposing they want to.
BTW ‘retart’: I suppose this to be the low slang ‘retard’, and to be an interesting example of the American voicing of the alveolar plosive in a terminal position.
BTW ‘retart’: I suppose this to be the low slang ‘ret*rd’, and to be an interesting example of the American voicing of the alveolar plosive in a terminal position.
Wow!!!!!!
I was trying to post including the word ‘r e t a r d’ (not insulting anyone, just discussing language).
It may be hard to differentiate usage of individual words, but surely in cases like this you could have some sort of a moderation process??
while their thinky followers spit? Definitely consistent with the behavior of PZ’s correspondent!
richardelguru: what, you’re amazed at automatic subsitition in slurs? That’s an old, old trick on the internet.
richardelguru@34,
It could be a glottal stop, which to English speakers’ ears sounds like a /t/.
numerobis
Actually it wouldn’t post at all. I eventually (hey I’m an old guy, and not as agile-brained as I hope I once was) sent the post paragraph at a time and realized that one word was the problem and did my own substitution.
What a Maroon, living up to the ‘nym
ʔ :-)
Wow ,any chance of letting us have this wackaloon’s email address so we can have some fun with him.
Read it twice can’t see anyone going out on a limp/limb .
richardelguru,
One of my professors told us a story about a Scottish linguist who claimed in a lecture that “there are no gloʔal stops in English.”
Maroon
Yeah! Tha’s much beʔer (or should that be beʔʔer?)
richardelguru,
I got nuʔn.
I felt a great disturbance in the language. As if a million English teachers suddenly cried out out in terror.
Drken,
You’d better stand in line :)
Regarding torture in the circumstances that Sam Harris defends, The Stanford Encyclopdia of Philosophy agrees with Sam Harris that it can be justified. The reference below also has an example where torture of a known quilty person revealed information that led to a young life being saved.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/torture/
Here is another example where torture led to a guilty person providing information that led to the recovery of the body of the young lad he abducted and killed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/10/world/kidnapping-has-germans-debating-police-torture.html
As for profiling “Muslims”, Sam Harris says he would defend profiling of “white middle-aged males” if the KKK suddenly decided to become suicide bombers. He also said that he himself would fit the Muslim profile, and the co-author of his most recent book, Majid Nawaz, definitely fits the profile, as does his friend, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
(Note 1: I am not defending Sam Harris’ views here, just correcting misconceptions about what he has said).
(Note 2: We have been over all of this in a previous thread, “Waffles with toxic syrup”, so I won’t repeat it all here).
billyjoe@45,
Well, it’s completely unsurprising that you’re pro-torture. I followed your Stanford Encyclopedia link. Here’s what we learn about the source of the case you cite:
How exactly do we know Mr. Blackler is telling the truth? Is it sufficient that he’s a police officer? But according to the link itself, he left the torture out of his official report, so he’s given two conflicting accounts of the same event. How do we know which one (if either) is true.
But let’s assume the case was exactly as described, and in this case, torure did save an innocent life. It’s undoubtedly the case that if we were all watched by AIs all the time – something that will almost certainly be technically feasible within decades – it would be far harder for murderers, terrorists, rapists and other serious malefactors to get away with their crimes. Are you in favour of total surveillance?
Your comment also reminds me of something said by the former British Prime Minister, Edward Heath – a man for whom I have in general, little regard. This was during a debate on capital punishment in the UK Parliament. A proponent of capital punishement boasted that he would be ready, if it were reintroduced, to pull the lever to hang a murderer himself. “That’s not the question”, replied Heath. “The question is whether you’re prepared to be executed by mistake”. I’d ask you the same question about torture – because if we (collectively) are prepared to say there are circumstances in which torture is justified, we can be morally certain that such a statement will be used to justify torture by the police, and that in some cases, the torture will be applied to innocent people, whom the police wrongly belief to be guilty, and to have information that would save lives. If you’re brave enough to say that you would be prepared to be tortured by mistake (possibly to death, because ex hypothesi, you cannot give the police the information they want), are you prepared to say it of everyone else? And suppose the police haven’t captured the evildoer, but have them on a two-way video link, and do have the evildoer’s young child. In order to coerce the evildoer into revealing the whereabouts of the bomb, would you support them torturing the child?
billyjoe@45
What Harris says he would say in other circumstances is not evidence of anything. It’s what he advocates now that is in question, and since there’s no serious argument that it would be effective, we need to ask why he is advocating it.
So. Fucking. What?
I note that in neither the case of torture, nor the case of profiling, have you actually corrected any misconceptions about what he has said, as you claimed – so we should ask why, in fact, you felt #45 was needed. We know what he has said. It stinks.
billyjoe@45
Although it’s not strictly relevant here, since you mention it, I am much amused that Harris has co-authored a book with the egregious fraud Majid Nawaz. And disgusted that he makes a friend of the well-known and (in some quarters) respected advocate of mass murder, Ayaan Hirsi Ali:
As a thought experiment, the only way to figure out what Harris really thinks, to cut through all the confusion about “context” and “straw men”, is to torture Sam Harris. I’m not actually advocating this, I’m just suggesting that if we’re really serious about understanding his important thoughts, we might have to consider waterboarding, or pulling fingernails, or attaching a car battery to his testicles, entirely as a last resort.
PZ@49 Well, Christopher Hitchens allowed himself to be waterboarded, and it seems to have had a salubrious effect on his moral character in that he never again entertained the idea of torture as an effective method of interrogation.
The professionals all pretty much tell us that torture doesn’t yield reliable information–indeed that it often yields disinformation just to make it stop. Indeed, consider the situation when the victim doesn’t in fact have the information the torturer wants. They will often make something up just to get it to stop. My experience is that torture is mostly advocated by cowards who fear torture.
okay billyjoe. There have been studies by people at Oxford department of ethics, saying “greater good moral arguments” not only do not show impartial concerns for good, but rather they are associated with sociopathy. Here is the study.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027714002054
So Stanford Encyclopedia is making a point which is simply wrong.
That said, the problem with Harris is beyond moral degeneracy; it is about inconsistent arguments that doesn’t apply to his side. The fact that he wants to be profiled like Muslims doesn’t show anything, because he does know he is not going to get into shit for this, Muslims are (and not for terrorism, just being for Muslims). He is very much concerned about a very rare event but rather silent and at times supportive of guns. How does one explain that? is he really interested in decreasing suffering or just in decreasing suffering in a very rare instance. Or he is so absorbed into religious violence by Muslims but when it comes to Israel, he completely ignores them and becomes a pathetic know-nothing apologist for them.
I can literally make any arguments and create any imaginary scenario to fit into my narrative. I can make arguments that we should jail Sam Harris because his worldviews are being used against a minority and if we can stop him from fanning the flame of religious hatred maybe we save one life. Who knows? right? if you want to use his arguments for his side, many US politicians should be outright killed because the rampant mass murder they unleashed upon the world (far greater than any 9/11). I imagine you know Harris’s worldviews on “collateral damage” and how he constantly demeans destroyed lives carried out by his beloved government.
KG,
Firstly, you must have missed where I said: “I am not defending Sam Harris’ views here, just correcting misconceptions about what he has said”.
Secondly, I am not pro-torture. That’s just a misconception on your part.
Thirdly, Sam Harris is not “pro-torture”. That’s the misconception I was trying to correct.
Sam Harris supports outlawing torture. And he has strongly denounced the torture that occurred at Abu Ghraib and Guantamano.
His argument is that in extraordinary circumstances he would support interrogators breaking the law against torture if it meant saving thousands of lives. The extraordinary circumstances include knowing that the person to be tortured is guilty; that he has information about an imminent military attack; that all other methods have failed to extract the information; that, if the information is obtained through torture, it could save thousands of lives.
In his opinion, collateral damage in a military attack is more ethically compromised than torture, especially where torture results in information that prevents a military attack that kills, burns, and maims innocent women and children as collateral damage.
In other words, Sam Harris’ view is not very much different from yours.
I would sympathise with your scepticism regarding that case in NSW where torture was said by the police officer to have saved a young boy’s life. But are you willing to grant that the Stanford University would not publish such as case unless they felt it was genuine? And it is obvious why the police officer would leave it out of the official report – because torture is illegal. The fact that he now thinks it is important enough to reveal what actually happened at the risk of being charged for torturing a prisoner, favours the view that he is telling the truth. Of course, given the outcome, there would not be much appetite for charging him with this offense, so the risk was probably not great.
You didn’t mention the second case. The boy was dead, but surely you could conceive of a situation where this was not the case. Suppose it was your son who was abducted. Would you really object to the police using torture in an attempt to find your son alive? Even though they would be breaking the law? And knowing that this probably has been successful in the past.
And are you aware of the book written in 2009 by an historian of the world wars which details events which suggests that, counter to popular belief, torturing has been used successfully to save lives? And that was direct testimony from the military officers involved? Sam Harris linked to it in one of his blogs, so you should be able to find it if you are interested.
Interestingly, paralleling the case of that NSW police officer, Sam Harris feels there also would not be much appetite for charging interrogators who broke the law against torture if the information obtained saved thousands of lives. Apparently there is also a legal defense in this case (can’t remember what it is called but it relies on the guiltofthe prisoner and a tragedy being averted) – which would not apply to what went on in Abu Ghraib for instance.
Finally, you bring up the problem of torturing an innocent person. That certainly could happen. But the scenario is that: 1) the intelligence gathered indicates that the prisoner is guilty beyond all reasonable doubt; 2) it is unlawful to torture prisoners; 3) the interrogators would be breaking the law and risking being charged if they tortured him. It could still happen that the prisoner is guilty but these features would significantly reduce that possibility.
(Your AI argument doesn’t apply because, obviously, innocent people would be targeted. And your capital punishment argument doesn’t apply because these people are killed, whereas those prisoners are being tortured, not killed. If they were, that would be murder. They are being tortured to extract information. Killing them would entirely defeat the purpose. It could happen accidentally, so the risks of that happeneing would need to be balanced against the benefits of obtaining information)
KG,
Regarding profiling:
That Sam Harris would support profiling “white middle-aged men” if the KKK suddenly decided to become suicide bombers was part of his defense against the charge that he is an anti-Muslim bigot. What is actually being profiled is suicide bombers. That means profiling Muslims because the vast majority of suicide bombers are Muslim. If suicide bombers were also members of the KKK, then members of the KKK would also be profiled.
It really comes down to this:
If you really did not have any misconceptions about what Sam Harris has actually said regarding torture and profiling, your arguments make no sense, because they are not directed against what he has actually said but against some common misconceptions about what he has said.
Your opinion about Majid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are not really relevant in this context. The purpose of mentioning them was to demonstrate that Sam Harris is not an anti-Muslim bigot.
Also many do not share your opinion about those two individuals.
You will note that Ayaan Hirsi Ali was talking about Islam (as represented by groups such as ISIS, Al Qaeda, and The Taliban). It was not directed against Muslims as a people. Majid Nawaz is a reformed terrorist. He now hopes to reform Islam to rid it of elements that justify the extremism of groups like the three mentioned above.
But this is outside the scope of this discussion.
billyjoe:
So, you accept both that he “supports outlawing torture” and that “he would support interrogators breaking the law against torture”.
(Me, I too support laws, but I also support breaking laws, ’cause I’m clever like you)
PZMyers,
That would only make sense if intelligence gathering indicated: 1) that Sam Harris was a guilty person beyond any reasonable doubt; 2) that Sam Harris had information about an imminent attack; 3) that all other attempts at extracting that information had failed; 4) extracting that information through torture would save lives.
Also, the original intention in his book was to compare the ethical issues associated with collateral damage with the ethical issues associated with torture. In his opinion, collateral damage (the killing, burning, and maiming of innocent women and children in a military strike) is more ethically compromised than torture, especially the torture of a guilty person to obtain information that could stop a military strike that inevitably involves collateral damage.
So the correct analogy would be asking Sam Harris if he would rather be tortured (i.e. waterboarded) or be the victim of collateral damage (placed in a building subject to a military strike). This, at least, was the question he asked of journalists who subjected themselves to waterboarding: would you rather be tortured or killed/burned/maimed as collateral damage in a military strike?
Sam Harris supports making or keeping torture illegal. He supports breaking the law against torture only in extraordinary one-off circumstances as described. And the whole misunderstanding arose as a result of him trying to demonstrate that torture is less ethically compromised than collateral damage – which everyone seems to accept as just part of waging war. Indeed note the use of a euphemism for what is actually the killing, burning, and maiming of innocent women and children. And, of course, those ordering military strikes know full well that there will be collateral damage. It’s not like it’s accidental collateral damage . It’s actually factored into the decision to make the military strike.
That is Sam Harris’ argument in any case.
a ray in dilbert space,
Others disagree:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-torture-helped-win-wwii
I do not know where the truth lies.
I imagine it could.
In Sam Harris scenario, a pre-requisite is that the prisoner is guilty beyond all reasonable doubt and that he has the required information beyond all reasonable doubt.
Obviously, It could still happen. It’s a matter of balancing possible risks and possible benefits, like a lot of things in life.
Wow, that’s quite a leap!
asbizar,
Maybe take that supposed error up with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
And, you forget, I am not writing in support of Sam Harris’ opinions on torture and profiling, let alone all his opinions on guns and Israel, just trying to correct misconceptions about his opinions on torture and profiling,
John Morales,
I said nothing about accepting it. Or rejecting it. I simply stated what Sam Harris said and why. He does not support routine torture. He supports making torture illegal to prevent atrocities such as Abu Ghraib. And, yes, he supports breaking this law in extraordinary one-off circumstances.
You mean clever like Sam Harris? :)
Okay, so it’s your son who has been abducted. Would you support the police torturing the known guilty person (if all other measures failed or if time was of the essence) with the hope (however slim you might believe that hope to be, but knowing that this has been successful in the past, however infrequently) of retrieving your son alive?
Laws are there (hopefully) for good reasons (to improve the general well-being of the population), but they cannot hope to cover all possible situations. And there is an established legal defense covering these situations which demonstrates that the lawmakers understand this all too well.
Alright, let’s call him “supportive of torture” instead of “pro-torture,” and you tell me why you think you may have corrected an important or relevant misconception that anybody actually had.
To me, it sounds like you’re just playing with words. But what do you think this has accomplished?
Guilty of what? And why would that make a difference?
They stole a candy bar at the truck stop — or they’re guilty of whatever the fuck you want — and now we get to violate human rights? What the fuck?
Should we treat ordinary convicts like dirt too, or only a very special type in very special circumstances that haven’t actually been … you know, specified, as the special things they supposedly are … in any detail?
What information? How would you know, if you don’t already have it, that there is any information to obtain, much less that it would save thousands of lives? If you know enough or have strong enough suspicions, then why aren’t you spending your precious time, as the movie villain’s bomb ticks down to zero, trying to save those thousands of lives? Because you’re not in a fucking movie?
How would you know that it can’t be had any other way? Why not do some actual investigative work, like a real law enforcement officer?
I mean, you ask the person without torturing them, don’t get information that you expected (possibly because they don’t have it), and then you conclude this “failed”? So that’s when it’s time to start torturing? If not then, when would it be the right time to do it, one which isn’t so patently fucking stupid and unethical?
Stanford supports the website for the encyclopedia, since it has lots of money and can afford to do so. That’s it. I’m sure the university does not pretend to vouch for everything which appears on it. Indeed, how could they do so, given that it’s a philosophical encyclopedia, which often involves discussion of multiple incompatible claims, sometimes groundless speculation, reasoning about abstractions and concepts, and so forth? What would Standford vouching for that even look like?
Or this information would’ve surfaced anyway; he might well be aware of that or paranoid about the possibility of it happening. It would favor the view that he’s telling the truth if he said it was pointless to torture the person, now he regrets doing it and will not attempt to excuse himself for his behavior. That would be risky and definitely more believable. In contrast, covering his ass, if that’s what’s actually going on, is not any sort of guarantee about the honesty or reliability of his account. And since in fact you don’t know what’s actually going on, you’ve got nothing here.
billyjoe:
<snicker>
Leaving aside that you accept he said what you claimed he said, what you stated he said is contradictory. So you’re accepting he made contradictory claims.
(Specifically, he both explicitly supports outlawing X and breaking the law outlawing X!)
Sure. As clever as both supporting ¬X and ¬¬X simultaneously.
(Which you deny you accept, but claim Harris does)
Children are for other people; I am not a breeder. Bad call. Maybe try a hypothetical that might apply to me. ;)
That said, the logic is ineluctable. If you support torture under certain circumstances, you support torture at least some of the time — it would be stupid to claim special circumstances never apply. In fact, once one admits the permissiveness of something under certain conditions, one need merely sufficiently justify its necessity. Hypotheticals make that very easy, no?
Heh. Quite recently, you handwaved away my allusion to the dictum that hard cases make bad law. Yet here you are, appealing to “all possible situations”, however implausible.
Actually, the USA is a signatory to the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which entails an absolute prohibition — entirely contrary to your claim. No exceptions.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_against_Torture#Signatories_and_ratifications)
—
Yeah, I know. You imagine hypocrisy is a valid defense, and true enough, it is in practice. After all, it’s what the USA does.
(But fine, Harris is a bullshitter who contradicts himself and appeals to hypocrisy as justification, by your own claims. Can hardly dispute you, there)
Re Harris’s “if the KKK suddenly became suicide bombers” quote, aren’t we all aware by now that white men are currently responsible for most deaths from terrorist attacks in the US? So, why aren’t we rounding up known white extremists & *torturing them for information? There are lives at stake!
*Just because I know from sad experience how the internet works, I’m not actually recommending anyone do this.
billyjoe
“Others disagree:” (when referring to “The professionals all pretty much tell us that torture doesn’t yield reliable information… “)
But your link, which is an opinion piece written by an extreme rightwing douchebag, who is in no way an expert on torture, doesn’t even show what you claim.
Why am I not surprised?
billyjoe, #45
It’s not a matter of “if”. White men do commit more mass murderous acts in the United States than Muslims. So Harris is clearly bullshitting.
Crys T,
But white men don’t do suicide bombing. White men prefer to do their bombing from a distance, where it’s so much cleaner (and they don’t risk killing a precious white man).
And profiling only works against suicide bombers, because reasons.
Billy Joe,
Proof by anecdata? To attribute the success at Normandy purely to enhanced interrogation is such a laughable oversimplification that it makes the whole piece suspect. Can torture work in some situations. Of course. However, you cannot rely on it to work, and when it fails it can backfire spectacularly.
The thing is that all the victim has to do is feed misinformation to his torturers until it is too late for them to do anything about it. It is a situation that would be quite amenable to a game theory analysis–and I guarantee you that torture would not be the winning strategy.
As to the cowards that advocate torture–look at the examples: Cheney, Trump, Duterte… All bullies. All cowards. They know they couldn’t stand up to torture. Inflicting it on others makes them feel like men.
It’s worse, it’s a guaranteed losing strategy. As you say, it’s possible for the victim to lie and if he’s a prepared terrorist, he should have already prepared a convincing lie. As a result, the torturer can’t possibly accept the answer he’s given. He has to assume that the victim is lying and continue the torture to secure the true answer. This continues no matter how many stories the victim tells and regardless of how much supporting evidence is given. A smart terrorist would happily give up the location of one bomb if he can hide the fact that there are three more out there. So, the torturer has to assume that there’s more out there and continue the torture.
Importantly, all this remains true even if the victim isn’t actually lying. Whether he’s completely innocent or if he’s a terrorist who has already told everything he knows, the result is the same: The torture continues. Consequently, there’s no incentive to tell the truth, because the torture will continue no matter what you do. The torturer can never allow himself to trust that he’s gotten the full, true answer, because that leaves the chance that a terrorist will be able to hide something and succeed with an attack.
Once torture starts, the torturer has no reason to stop and the victim has no reason to tell the truth.
A close relative who has participated in several military interrogations tells me that the best way to get people to talk is to buy them a soda.
LykeX,
In some ways, when interrogator and prisoner are in an adversarial relationship, torture will just reinforce the negative preconceptions each has about the other–making the prisoner feel justified in the harm he knows is about to be inflicted.
The scenarios constructed to justify torture are always just that–carefully constructed. They ignore the messiness that is always there in a real adversarial situation. They ignore the humanity of the participants. And they presume that torture is an effective form of coercion. It’s a simply shiny hologram designed to make you step onto the slippery slope, and by the time you finally realize that there was nothing there to begin with, you’re sliding down with all the other monsters.
John Morales,
The fact that you cannot see how it is not contradictory to support a law that makes torture illegal and supporting breaking that law in extraordinary circumstances is a failure on your part. I have explained it before, but here it is again: Sam Harris supports a law making torture illegal in order eliminate what he calls “routine torture” as occurred in places like Abu Ghraib and Guantamano. And, presumably, perpetrated by some police against some suspects. However, he envisages extraordinary situations where abiding by that law could result in thousands of deaths that could have been avoided if that law had been broken. He would support breaking the law against torture in those one-off type situations should they ever occur. As I said, even the legal profession supports those situations in that there is a legal defence for breaking a law when it results in a better outcome than abiding by the law. The legal profession realises that laws cannot possibly cover every possible scenario.
I hope that is clear now.
Well, it seems you understand after all :)
And now you’re back to not understanding it.
Yes hard cases make bad law – so you don’t make torture legal because there are extraordinary circumstances in which torture produces a better outcome. So you don’t use “all possible situations” when making laws.
Yes, there is an absolute prohibition in that convention.
But that does nothing to counter the my argument, which I will state again:
If there is a situation where someone breaks a law that results in a better outcome than if he had not broken the law, his lawyer has a legally recognised line of defense that can avoid him being convicted.
You seem to find contradictions where there are none.
So, I truly hope you understand Sam Harris’ argument at long last.
You don’t have to agree with it but, if you are going to criticise him, you really do need to understand his argument.
Crys T,
Although I have made the distinction many times already, let me repeat once again: There is a difference between suicide bombers and terroists. The former is a subset of the latter. Suicide bombers are terrorists who blow themselves up in their acts of terrorism. Sam Harris is talking about suicide bombers. Suicide bombers are almost all Muslims.
Also, he is not limiting himself to the USA.
I understood his fuckwittery years ago. That if you don’t, says fanboi, what a liar and bullshitter you are. I know the “dog whistles”. Nothing but dog whistles from Harris and his fanbois like you….DISMISSED.
From @70,
I would like to think you meant to say, . What you said, however, is, in effect, .
What makes you think that? What is the legal defense?
John Morales already linked to the U.N. convention, as you know, which doesn’t appear to allow for a defense of that kind. And I don’t know of any laws, which contain a provision that you can “break” them (i.e., there are exceptions in which they’re not actually broken), in some nebulous set of circumstances that the law doesn’t even describe.
zenlike,
Whether or not the writer is as you described is irrelevant. Andrew Roberts is an historian so, if it’s an opinion piece, it’s the opinion piece by an expert regardless of his politics. The real question is: does his 2009 book: ” Masters and Commanders: How Churchill, Roosevelt, Alanbrooke and Marshall Won the War in the West, 1941-45″ really show that “enhanced interrogation techniques have saved thousands of lives in every war”. I haven’t read the book, and I’m not an historian, so I can’t comment, but it would seem strange to make that very bold claim if it wasn’t true, or at east partly true..
This is part of what he claims:
“there has not been a war in history in which torture has not been employed in some form or another, and sometimes to excellent effect. When troops need information about enemy capabilities and intentions—and they usually need it fast—moral and ethical conventions (especially the one signed in Geneva in 1929) have repeatedly been ignored in the bid to save lives”
And this:
“The very success of the D-Day landings themselves can largely be put down to the enhanced interrogation techniques that were visited upon several of the 19 Nazi agents who were infiltrated into Great Britain and “turned” by the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) between 1939 and 1945. Operation Fortitude—the deception plan that fooled the Germans into stationing 450,000 Wehrmacht troops 130 miles north of the Normandy beaches—entirely depended upon German intelligence (the Abwehr) believing that the real attack was going to take place at the Pas de Calais instead. The reason that Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, was utterly convinced of this, was because every single one of his 19 agents, who he did not know had been turned, told him so”
These are pretty bold claims by an historian and would need to be refuted by other historians to bolster the contrary claim that torture is rarely if ever useful.
Saad,
To repeat yet again, Sam Harris is talking about suicide bombers not the broader category terrorists.
And suicide bombers are nearly all Muslims.
Maroon,
I’m not sure that profiling works, and Scheier, who is apparently an expert in these matters, is of the opinion that profiling does not work (and neither does “random checks” at airports). But you do not help you case – except superficially in the view of those who already agree with you – by misunderstanding of misquoting what Sam Harris is saying.
Nerd of Redhead,
Unfortunately, hen you have nothing but expletives and deletives, you actually have nothing.
I think you have been misunderstanding Sam Harris for many years and now, in order to avoid admitting that all your anger has been wasted, you need to double down.
Unfortunately, you have missed a good learning experience – do not rely on secondary sources. Get you information first hand.
blf,
That is an error in logic.
This is your reasoning:
All suicide bombers are Muslim.
This person is a Muslim.
Therefore this person is a suicide bomber.
Or even worse:
Almost all suicide bombers are Muslim.
This person is a Muslim.
Therefore this person is a suicide bomber
This logical error is called “Affirming the Consequent”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent
Conciousness Razor,
I didn’t say it was a law.
I said it was a legal defense.
Here is an example under Californian Criminal Law.:
https://www.shouselaw.com/necessity.html
“The legal defense of necessity allows someone accused of a crime to avoid being found guilty if they can show that they had a sufficiently good reason for committing the crime”
billyjoe:
Heh. On the contrary, it is you who fails to see a contradiction when it’s there.
Either something is absolutely prohibited, or it’s not.
There is not such a thing as the intersection of ‘absolutely prohibited’ and ‘conditionally permissible’.
You seem to like appealing to logic, so here is the proposition you deny expressed in symbolic form using zeroth-order propositional logic:
¬(P ∧ ¬ P)
But fine — I accept that you hold something can simultaneously be absolutely prohibited and not absolutely prohibited. It is really quite an informative datum.
consciousness razor
I missed your previous comment:
I can do that by simply correcting you yet again:
Sam Harris supports a law that makes torture illegal because it helps to eliminate the sort of atrocities as occurred in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo; and he supports the breaking of that law in extraordinary one-off situations where lives would be saved by breaking that law that would not be saved by abiding by that law.
You can’t turn this into a three word phrase and not lose something.
I am not the one playing with words.
I am being precise with words.
Others are playing fast and loose with words, that’s the problem.
I don’t know what this has accomplished, because it depends on what the recipients do with my input.
He would be guilty if he is known to have committed a crime.
This does not necessarily imply that he has been found guilty in a court of law.
For example, the person who kidnapped the young boy is guilty of kidnapping (he was caught while collecting the ransom)
It seems you missed my reference, even though “extraordinary circumstances” should have been a clue.
That person kidnapped a young boy for ransom. He was caught collecting the ransom. He was tortured to extract information about the boy’s whereabouts in order to hopefully save his life.
A known Al Qaeda operative is captured. Intelligence gathering concludes that he knows of an imminent attack by Al Qaeda. All other measures fail. He is tortured to extract that information in the hope of saving thousands of lives.
Nothing to so with candy stealers and ordinary prisoners being tortured
Information collected by intelligence agencies around the world that the person who has been captured is a known terrorist and that he has information about an imminent attack that would kill thousands of people. And they are “trying to save those thousands of lives” by extracting the information that would save those thousands of lives by torturing him because all other methods have failed.
Meanwhile a young lad is dying somewhere.
Okay, if you are going to dispute that story, I have supplied another example that is a whole lot harder to dispute. An there is that account of torture during the world wars which prevented death among allied troops. And if you dispute both of those examples as well, then what you are reduced to claiming is that there has never been, and never will be, a situation where torture has led, or will lead, to lives being saved. That would be…um…an extraordinary claim.
Well, you certainly have your narrative :)
He says he tortured a person to extract information that saved a young boy’s life. He is hardly going to say that it is “pointless to torture” the kidnapper and that “he regrets doing it” when it saved the young boy’s life.
John Morales,
The LAW is that torture is absolutely prohibited.
The LEGAL DEFENSE OF “NECESSITY” can prevent you from being convicted under this law if you can show that you had a sufficiently good reason for breaking that law.
For example if lives were saved as a result of you breaking that law.
…perhaps we need a lawyer who has expertise in the defense of necessity and the law against torture.
But if what I lose is a bunch of vague and totally indefensible bullshit, then I haven’t lost anything that I wanted to keep.
For fuck’s sake, I wanted to know which things a person must be guilty of, in order to justify torturing them. And I wanted to know how that is supposed to be a justification. This doesn’t answer either question.
I don’t think you’re illiterate, just dishonest. Be more honest.
Why not? Which steps of reasoning did you use, which crystal ball did you look at, etc., to get there? In other words, what fucking method is it, that we all could have and comprehend and write about, in order to determine that those have nothing to do with it? Or is there nothing like that?
LOL, am I supposed to be stunned into silence?
If there is another way to get the information (did you even read the questions?), then this other way could save the lad and not torture somebody. If you were consistent, you could say this kind of circumstance is thus not one of the “extraordinary” ones, which are presumably supposed play some role in your argument. That’s an option that you had here.
But you’re very eager to just get on with the torturing and use the potential/hypothetical victim as a prop. You don’t care how extraordinary the circumstances actually are, because the exchange above indicates that you think even asking the question of whether or not it is extraordinary is wasting time, while a person (who might not even exist) might be dying (if your baseless suspicions happen to be true).
So, you don’t get to play that card anymore with me, because it is pure bullshit. But don’t worry: you’re totally full of shit, so I’m sure there’s still much more to come. ‘Tis but a flesh wound.
Apparently you mistake me for someone who gives a fuck about what you (or Harris) has to say. You’ve used up countless electrons essentially saying that Harris claims that sometimes there are extenuating circumstances. Well, yeah, you could make the same case about speeding or shoplifting, and you’d probably get less resistance. But what you (and Harris) are missing is that torture is (a) always wrong morally and (b) largely ineffective (as I said above, you can get a lot more from a bottle of soda than you can from torture).
Anyway, I’m not going to engage you further. You’re just repeating yourself; at some point you have to realize that it’s not worth the effort.
Consciousness razor,
Kidnapping – it’s in the very quote you used!
Saving the young boy’s life – it’s in the part you didn’t quote!
As honest as I can be responding to your angry comments.
If you were told the boy died while you were “investigating”, I hope so.
Maroon,
Sam Harris originally bought up a discussion of torture in his book, “The End of Faith”. He was actually discussing the morals or ethics of torture versus collateral damage. His point was that, in some circumstances, torture is less morally compromised than collateral damage, especially when torture provides information that prevents a military strike involving the death, burning, and maiming of innocent women and children as “collateral damage”. The entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy agrees.
And, when you say it is largely ineffective, you are effectively saying is that sometimes it is effective – like maybe in the two cases I referred to, and maybe during WW2 if Andrew Roberts’ account of WW2 is true.
It’s not my fault that you and others keep using the same arguments that I’ve responded to repeatedly.
Harris didn’t say kidnapping is the only time when it would be justifiable. Neither did you. There was all this talk about “thousands” of lives, as well as “military attacks” of some sort, in addition to “suicide bombers.” Don’t you remember?
At this point, there’s no telling how long this list will turn out to be, if you just keep jabbering away, inventing more and more situations when it’s supposed to be okay, without explaining why any of them are. You have a vaguely-defined and indefinitely long list of scary shit, with a side of pants-shitting fear. That’s all this is, not an argument for anything, not a solution to anything, not even a way of figuring out what goes on the fucking list and what doesn’t.
If you added “clowns,” I asked why and got the response “but think of the poor children!!1!”, then you would’ve done just as much work to explain it (exactly zero) as you have with the others mentioned above.
And no, just in case you’re wondering, I won’t be comforted by the thought that only Muslim clowns should make it onto your list, you ridiculous fucking asshole.
If you can’t be honest, it’s not my fault.
CR,
You are obviously not following the discussion.
It started in another thread, so maybe that’s the problem.
In any case, I think I’ve said all I Intended to say, and several times over.
There’s too many people asking the same questions, maybe that’s the problem.
So let’s just leave it there.
Except I reserve the right to correct commenters in the future if the need arise.
And they will correct your many mistakes, evasions, lack of evidence, and your bafflegabble. As you are wrong.
billyjoe
“Whether or not the writer is as you described is irrelevant.”
What part is not relevant?
That he is not an expert? Of course that is relevant.
That he is an extreme rightwing douchebag? Of course that is relevant (by the way, it is how he descibes himself). Seriously you are quoting a guy who is an apologist for almost every bad thing British colonialism has done, including gunning down hundreds of innocents including children when they dared to protest British rule. That makes him a moral monster, and incapable of giving correct insight on the topic of torture.
“I haven’t read the book, and I’m not an historian, so I can’t comment, but it would seem strange to make that very bold claim if it wasn’t true, or at east partly true..”
And yet you bring it up. You. Not me. In the future, either link to a source you stand behind yourself, or spare us your bullshit.
“These are pretty bold claims by an historian and would need to be refuted by other historians to bolster the contrary claim that torture is rarely if ever useful.”
That wasn’t the claim you used this link for. Are you really incapable of formulating a coherent thought, or are you just a contrarian troll?
Billyjoe
I had promised myself not to engage in argument with insufferable fanatics (yes that includes you). This is my last comment and you can be happy with your echo chamber.
“His point was that, in some circumstances, torture is less morally compromised than collateral damage, especially when torture provides information that prevents a military strike involving the death, burning, and maiming of innocent women and children as “collateral damage”. ”
Again, I can simply make this argument for killing US politicians. If that creates less misery for many other people – which it does- then that’s morally justified. Harris doesn’t understand or doesn’t want to understand the difference between predicting something and commenting on something retrospectively. You can’t be 100% accurate in the case of former. How would you know that torturing is going to give you answers. Also, why the fuck would I want someone to choose between torture and bombing people. That’s what sociopaths do: creating false choices. Also if you are going to say “what if”, I would answer that real world works in terms of probabilities not imaginary scenarios.
Harris’s “collateral damage” nonsense is a way of dehumanizing the other rather than his concern for their lives.
“And, when you say it is largely ineffective, you are effectively saying is that sometimes it is effective – like maybe in the two cases I referred to, and maybe during WW2 if Andrew Roberts’ account of WW2 is true.”
Yes, of course torture can occasionally be “effective” in getting information, but 1. you would know that only AFTER the fact and 2. it requires you to believe you have no choice. Who decides that?
That said, it is always morally despicable. Sam Harris’s is assuming that you can define morality by body counts in false dichotomy scenarios. That’s a “way of looking at things” for people who have little concern for the greater good (See the article I referenced above)