Sam Harris has an explanation for why some people (but not him, oh no, don’t accuse him of being so seduced by an all-encompassing bias that he would become an anti-vaxxer) would fall for anti-scientific ideas: the Woke made them do it. Wokeness is infuriating, don’t you know, so infuriating that it makes people abandon reason.
Might be as simple as: The establishment has been captured by an infuriating ideology (wokeness) which is contaminating even the most basic scientific and medical communication. So… now I will trust only non-standard sources of information and look for conspiracies everywhere.
— Sam Harris (@SamHarrisOrg) December 27, 2021
This, of course, makes no sense, but then many of Harris’s rationalizations don’t hold up to inspection. What is this ideology of wokeness that he is blaming for everything? It seems to be vaguely defined as a recognition that there is injustice in the world (patently true), and that systems of power tend to perpetuate that injustice (also true, but a more complex issue that may we could argue about nuances over). But blaming the people you disagree with for driving you into more extreme positions, of radicalizing you, is bogus. Your position is yours. You can’t blame others for it.
Would Harris accept it if an Islamic fundamentalist said, “The establishment has been captured by an infuriating ideology (secularism) which is contaminating even the most basic scientific and medical communication. So… now I will trust only my imam”? That logic takes extremism off the hook.
Or “The establishment has been captured by an infuriating ideology (atheism) which is contaminating even the most basic scientific and medical communication. So… now I will trust only my Bible”? We can play this game of opposites all day, constantly claiming that the contrary position made me do it. It makes it easy to take disagreement as affirmation.
Also, the purpose of this illogical argument is crystal clear. Harris himself is a member of an ideological tribe, these IDW conservatives, through which the disease of science denialism and anti-vax nonsense is sweeping. See Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying and Joe Rogan for examples, also note that Jordan Peterson has joined the party.
Up yours @JustinTrudeau. Seriously. You'd have to kill me first. https://t.co/tBvwB2g3mp
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) December 25, 2021
With all of his good buddies embracing the anti-science banner, poor Sam Harris is in the position of having to make excuses for the irrationality of his clique. Sure, the Woke made them do it!
Does he even realize how familiar this religious argument sounds?
Didn’t some right wing NYT columnist–I want to say it was Doubthat–offer that same excuse as for why conservatives prefer Crestionism?
EDIT: Creationism
@ Akira, # 2: We’d also accept “cretinism.”
Again and again, I found myself thinking, ‘If someone told me a year ago how far we would go down the ad absurdum rabbit hole by now, I would have said, no way, it could never get that bad’. Now, I don’t think there’s a bottom anymore; I just wonder where we will drop to next. Will the insanity ever get so bad that it gets self-destructive and maybe we see the end of it? They are already proudly killing themselves and each other, but it hasn’t seemed to even slow down the arrogant madness.
Harris made an interesting confession. It sounds to me that folks being “woke” or “social justice warriors” have been (justly) calling out/exposing bigots, misogynists, institutional racism (and other anti-equality policies), abuse/abusers etc. and somehow Harris doesn’t like it, or got tired of hearing about it…so he figuratively stuck his head in the sand and spent his time in conservatives’ social media/news bubble/ echo chamber, where no one tells ‘me too’ stories or gets assholes who do assholery ‘canceled’—but there is a dark side to those who dwell there, in addition to the bigots et.al. there are also anti-vaxxers (often the same folks) and Harris found their arguments persuasive because- if he agrees with them about the bigotry (or whatever) he thinks they are correct about other things too.
I’m speculating that this phenomenon is very common- if some group agrees with your opinions on one subject, you may become more easily persuaded to accept the groups views on other (unrelated) subjects—some people exploit this; it is how propaganda works. Some people are lazy thinkers and wallow in it
“Oh noes, you uppity people coined a word. It destroyed my sense of personal responsibility and made me do stupid things. Poor me. [sniff]”
The guy’s too juvenile to recognize how juvenile he is.
I thought Sam Harris had disassociated with the IDW.
Good to see, in any case, that he is now getting his cues from such fine upstanding not-so-dark intellectuals as David Frum.
Sam Harris is at least consistent.
He is consistently a complete and total idiot.
BTW, the establishment hasn’t been captured by wokeness, whatever that is.
Which has not captured the most basic medical and scientific communication.
Sam Harris is simply lying here!!!
“Woke”, “wokeness” and whatever else people use as synonyms are just labels meaning “this is something that’s probably politically liberal and I hate it so I’m just going to slap this label on it and declare it bad rather than actually address the issue being discussed.”
When we last left Jordan Peterson, he had gone to Moscow to try and kick his drug addiction to benzodiazapines, caught pneumonia, ended up on a ventilator, and almost died. He then went to Serbia for the same reason and…caught the Covid-19 virus.
Peterson can’t even run his own life and has no business or credibility telling others how to run theirs.
He is also of course, wrong again.
FWIW, no vaccine mandates aren’t the actions of totalitarian state, as Peterson claimed.
They are the actions of virtually all free democracies in the world as well as most of the other nations.
They are the actions of states that are attempting to keep their citizens alive and healthy and their economies going.
It is in no one’s interest to have piles of dead bodies in refrigerated trucks while sick people overwhelm the hospitals and many of those end up permanently disabled long haulers.
This Covid-19 virus pandemic is going to cost us a lot and leave a mark on our society for generations. There are already around 200,000 orphans that our foster care system can’t easily care for.
In Realityland, there is a simple way to figure out why antivaxxers are antivaxxers.
Just ask them.
Polls show 20% of Americans think there are microchips in the vaccines. Which is stupid.
No one cares how many trips to the Tasty Freeze or 7-11 you go on.
90% of the antivaxxers are worried by vaccine side effects more than they are worried about the “side effects” of getting Covid-19 virus, which include death 1.6% of the time.
Notably absent among the reasons why people don’t get vaccinated is anything to do with wokeness. The usual. Reality 1 Sam Harris 0
Follow that twitter thread and you will see that Harris was not promoting non-standard sources and conspiracies, but that was part of the explanation he was giving for why some others do. That is, the “Might be as simple as:” applied to the entire rest of the tweet, “The establishment has been captured by an infuriating ideology (wokeness) which is contaminating even the most basic scientific and medical communication. So… now I will trust only non-standard sources of information and look for conspiracies everywhere.”
Let’s criticize Harris for things deserving criticism, not red herrings.
I was quite careful and plain to say that anti-vax is not what Harris says he believes, but that this is the excuse he is offering for why his allies are anti-vax. He is being criticized for the bullshit he offers to justify their belief.
You might try reading what I, that is, the author of the post, actually wrote as carefully as your close reading of Harris to defend him.
They tend to prefer lower, bogus values for the death rate that are floating around. But among the more ridiculous are those comparing the death rate of COVID to the rate of all side effects to the vaccine – as if COVID didn’t have other effects besides death. As if breathing through a tube for five weeks didn’t have profound effects – short term health effects, long term health effects, financial effects. As if “Long COVID” wasn’t so common that a term was coined for it. As if the percentage of COVID patients suffering long term symptoms weren’t in the double digits (Numbers will vary depending on severity of infection used to qualify inclusion, symptoms included, and length of time).
Yeah, I noticed that.
They usually claim it is 99.7% survivable. Which is just a lie.
It is currently 1.6% fatal cases.
The Covid-19 virus long haulers run around 25% of the cases, depending on the study and inclusion criteria. Somewhere around half of those will be permanently disabled, say 12.5% of the cases.
Do the math.
50 million cases so far in the USA. 6.25 million permanently disabled long haulers. So far.
This pandemic is far from over with.
Half of those on the ventilators/ECMO will die. Of those who survive, half of them again will be dead within a year. Very few will ever be what they were.
Average bill for an ECMO patient is $1.5 million.
@alan1 Harris is just being Harris, i.e. duplicitous. He is just rationalizing and justifying and covering for his own false beliefs – Islamic conspiracy theories etc.
Is there some golden age when the “establishment” could be counted on to deliver purely objective information without any bias or agenda? If so, I wonder when that was. By Harris’s logic, Cold War hysteria should have been a great reason to ignore public service campaigns in favor or seat belts and against littering and forest fires when I was a child. I mean Smokey and Woodsy were obviously working for The Man, right? Why should I believe their shit? Our continued presence in Vietnam negated all PSAs through at least 1973. And going back to the 50s, the government, at least state governments, could be overtly racist in their messaging. And yet somehow the “establishment” was able to get people to accept polio vaccinations.
It’s unclear if Harris is capable of thinking this through. It’s possible that he means he’s OK with the ideology as long as he does not personally find it infuriating, which may be the most honest explanation. If he’s promoting actual critical thinking, this involves the skill of separating the message from the messenger and evaluating the accuracy of claims yourself.
If anybody is going to be physically frail enough to get smoked by covid, it’s comatose j-peets. That’s my main takeaway here – home boy is not long for the world, and I’m lovin’ it.
alan1 @12:
Follow that twitter thread and you will see that Harris was not promoting non-standard sources and conspiracies, but that was part of the explanation he was giving for why some others do.
And his “explanation” is FALSE. Such falsehood is deserving of criticism, no?
Re: raven @ #11…
As regards “microchips in the vaccine” and “it’s to track people”, I have some prepared arguments. The first is to point out the size of a working chip vs. the size of the needles used. A chip that will do anything–never mind big enough to hold an RFID circuit–wouldn’t fit through the needle. RFID (the only plausible tracking tech for these silly ideas…anything else would require including a battery) is very short range, so totally useless for general tracking. One can ask the person making the claim if they own a cell phone. The answer will almost certainly be, “Yes.” It can then be pointed out that cell phones are, in fact, tracked. They have to be in order to function (that is, the cell towers have to be able to determine how to route calls or data to them), so the person making the claim is VOLUNTARILY being tracked already.
Sam Harris was also blaming the victims.
That is us and our society.
It is not the fault of us normal people that 820,000 Americans have died from the virus, that there are 6.25 million permanently disabled long haulers, that the hospitals are overwhelmed and have partially collapsed, that our economy took a big hit, that there are 200,000 new orphaned children, and all the other damage that the pandemic has caused.
To be fair, some of that would have happened anyway.
The fundie xian/GOP/right wingnuts have affected the magnitude though, they have made it a whole lot worse!!! A process which is ongoing right now.
By not getting vaccinated, opposing simple things like masks and social distancing, attacking health care workers and the health care system, and promoting quack cures that don’t work like Ivermectin and hydroxychloroguine.
IDW is yet another group of white men who have a hideously overestimated sense of their own brilliance. It used to be a white man actually had to contribute something to humanity before he could take his place among the upper echelons of the “Great Race.” For instance, William Shockley developed the microprocessor before ruining his legacy by arguing Black people are genetically inferior.
Nowadays, just having white skin and arrogance is enough to gain you lemmings. As for Harris, I’m surprised he still shows his face after being humiliated by Ben Affleck a few years ago on Bill Maher’s show.
(This will enlighten some of Raven’s points.)
I run ConReg for a regional convention. We have on our web page (see http://www.dundracon.com) our COVID mitigation policy for the upcoming convention. At least 3 people have accused us of being “Nazis” for that policy. We are going to require proof of vaccination and masking during the convention for all members.
Re: raven @ #21…
A few of them are doing what they can by promoting that hospitalization is a trap and bad for you and not going to one when they really should, and thus dying without taking a bed from someone else.
Looooook what you made me do!
Re: Walter Solomon @ #22…
Shockley was involved with (and usually credited with) inventing the transistor. Now it’s true that having transistors led to complete circuits on single chips, but the later isn’t what Shockley is associated with.
Lookit lookit lookitty look look! You must see me!
Harris is so reason! Very science!
First, what’s political about vaccines? Why does he connect them with “the left”? In what way has “woke” (whatever that may be) infected the official stance of “mask, distance, get vaccinated”? If you see politics lurking in every medical situation, your brain is on conspiracy and your stupid positions are wholly your own fault.
Then, for almost all anti-vaxxers, I don’t believe that their “reasons” are truly motivating them. I think their decision to be against vaccines was made already, on an unconsicous, primitive-brain, tribal level, and that everything they say, however much they may believe it, is rationalizations for their actions that were produced afterwards.
whheydt @26
Thanks for the correction. It has been a while since I’ve last read about his work.
@20, along with what you say, wouldn’t the immune system reject a chip? The sort of chips that you put into cats and dogs are placed under the skin, like tattoo ink, and are apparnetly regarded by the body as just something like a splinter. But the vaccine goes into….what? Your blood stream, or something?
Sam Harris, critical thinker extraordinaire, trying to “cancel” “wokeness” by using straw hammer and nails to seal its coffin.
whheydt@26 True about Shockley. However, his terrible management style may have been vital in getting the semiconductor industry rolling, at least as legend has it. If I read this right he was still obsessed with turning the Shockley diode into a commercial product at the time when the Traitorous Eight founded Fairchild. They are the ones credited with the ‘first commercially practicable integrated circuit’. So if Shockley hadn’t been such an asshole, the best entrepreneurial talent would have been spend bringing one specialized technology to market. Law of unintended consequences FTW! (Granted, that’s making some leaps, but I like it as a Silicon Valley origin story, along with Hewlett and Packard.)
@30 &@20 and others. Microchips: the first point to make is “what happens when you forget to plug in your phone overnight? The biggest problem with doing anything with small chips is power. Half of your cell phone is battery and it is barely enough. Chips in credit cards and dog id chips rely on being placed against a charging coil when in use and are dead the rest of the time. For these chips the biggest problem is then making a power pick up antenna big enough to produce enough voltage to anything. The only thing these small chips do is store and echo back data sent to them when plugged in – they can’t possibly record where you are.
Jordon Peterson is guilty of plagiarism: Sarah Palin came up with the anti-vax response: “over my dead body” first.
@34, then again, Marcus Lamb and a number of other anti-vax preachers have already brought Sarah Palin’s plan to fruition. So they get “reduced to practice” credit.
Re: bcw bcw @ #33…
RFID tags use an antenna (which can be pretty small…but not small enough to fit through the needles used for vaccination) to pick up power from the transmitter in the reader to power the reply. So, while the chip itself doesn’t really get located, the reader can be and the chip will be very close to where the reader is.
However, as I noted, for anyone carrying a powered-on cell phone, any embedded RFID tag is pointless anyway. The phone can and will be located for a variety of purposes.
raven @ 10:
“It is in no one’s interest to have piles of dead bodies in refrigerated trucks while sick people overwhelm the hospitals and many of those end up permanently disabled long haulers.”
Oh, I don’t know. If the piles of dead bodies consisted of the talking heads at Fox, Jordan Peterson himself, most of the current GOP leadership, and lots of Proud Boys and other such vermin, I think that would be very much in the public interest.
It makes me think of a dumb anti mask mandate argument I got recently.
If you mandate masks, the rebels will not wear them.
That presupposes the rebels would wear them otherwise. That is evidentially untrue.
Re: DanDare @ #38…
Ah! But the smart rebels will wear masks so as not to be identified as rebels prematurely. Therefore, when there is a mask mandate, only the dumb rebels won’t wear them, and can be identified as such.
raven@10
Sure it is, and not just the companies that rent refrigerated trucks. A lot of people thrive on chaos and the continuation of a crisis. Do you think the legal teams who have worked hard to kneecap government at every level since the beginning of the crisis are too stupid to see the consequences or see them and either don’t care or consider it a feature?
Another thing, the bodies in trucks may not be a direct benefit, but the perception that government has failed once again does wonders to preserve the Reagan mythology that the public sector can do nothing right. The most terrible outcome would be if government had succeeded through competent public health policy to address an emergency. Let something like that happen and a large number of citizens may come around to believing in the benefits of effective governance.
Christ, that asshole again. It’s the same excuse every abuser uses — “You/she/he/they MADE ME DO IT!”
Raven@10: Did anyone ever explain why JP had to go all the way to Moscow, or Serbia, to try to kick a drug addiction? It’s not like no one in America can ever kick a habit without leaving the country…
My first thought was that this would be pointless. Fruitloop ‘splaining never seems to make much sense. But I hadn’t considered that it’s so bad it can’t even explain fruitloops. At some point you’d expect it to be good for something, but it’s not even rising to the level of a bad excuse.
In order of expression from Harris’s tweet:
…”Wokeness” is only “infuriating” if you feel the urge to preserve ancient injustices.
…If “wokeness” had captured the establishment, Republicans would have no power.
…”Wokeness” is not contaminating basic science or medicine communications; Harris is welcome to provide some real-world examples; I suspect he will only be able to dig up a handful from fringe publications; in the meantime, there are active attempts to write blatantly fabricated history and science into high school textbooks…from self-described enemies of “wokeness”.
…There is nothing wrong with looking into non-standard sources, but if you believe patent rubbish because it comes from a non-standard source then you aren’t any kind of skeptic or rationalist, or even a minimally competent thinker.
…Likewise for anyone who “looks for conspiracy theories everywhere.”
…Worse, if your trusted “non-standard sources” include anti-vaxxers, climate change denialists, “scientific” racists, neoliberal economists, or Jordan Petersen, then you are a contemptible fool regardless of whatever you insist your IQ is.
…Being unable to perceive the glaring scientific and moral flaws in these sources disqualifies you from blaming anyone else for pretty much anything, let alone whatever malignant beliefs you choose to hold.
As I understand it, ‘wokeness’ is not an ideology or an indication of activism; rather, it’s a state of awareness.
(Yeah, I know… word meanings are a subjective thing. But still)
Yeah, lots of people seem to be saying they think being awake is somehow bad…
John Morales @ 45
Example: If the wife of your neighbour has a black eye remarkably often, anyone who is not a pile of shit should sit up and react.
I assume S H itpile would consider this an unacceptable ideology.
Raging Bee@42 Peterson’s daughter claimed North American doctors wouldn’t treat his drug problem the way he wanted them to, so they went to Russia. Not much of a surprise that Peterson, who thinks he’s the second coming of Aristotle or something, wouldn’t listen to experts on drug treatment.
timgueguen@48
I doubt it’s limited to doctors or his drug problem. “You guys are meanies. I’m going to Russia where they’ll treat me the way I deserve to be treated.”
If you’re going to be honest with yourself then you have to admit that today’s “wokeness” has gone beyond absurd. I’m all for calling out bad behavior but all too often we see a lot of bullying being done by the left, especially on college campuses. Try giving a lecture at any university today that goes against the grain and see how fast people organize to shut it down. They’re behaving like creationists and that’s scary.
Citation and demonstration needed @50
@50: How, exactly, has “today’s “wokeness” … gone beyond absurd?” Can you even define what “wokeness” is? Have “the left” (another term you fail to define) become absurdly awake?
@48: Thanks for the answer. So how, exactly, did JP want to be treated? And did JP ever specify what the Moscow doctors did?
simonhadley@50
What university? What “grain”? (which probably varies a lot between, say, UC Berkeley and Texas A&M) What people?
I would be surprised to find out that you had ever given a lecture* at any university, but please fill in that detail as well as others above if you want your statement to be more than a recitation of a lazy talking point. BTW, campus conservatives were whining about “speech codes” at least 30 years ago. Go back a few decades further and you’ll find it was the administration who were routinely and openly censoring speech as a matter of policy. (Hence the “free speech movement” of the 60s.)
*I have, though I’m not proud of it. I taught some programming courses many moons ago and kind of sucked.
Raging Bee @53
IIRC he wanted to go cold turkey, but be sedated and on a drip while he did so. I am no addiction specialist, but my understanding is that resolving the physical addiction is only a part of of what you need to recover.
And yeah as WMDKitty — Survivor suggested “you made me do it” is the excuse of abusers from childhood bullies to rapists and murderers.
@ Raging Bee
From the Cambridge Dictionary online. Wokeness: A state of being aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality.
Okay, that’s a pretty fair description and a concept I support. Social problems exist and should continue to be addressed, as has been done for quite some time now. Some of our biggest and most important sources of social change have taken place at our universities. The absurdity is people looking for any excuse to be outraged in order to show the world how righteous they are and this is primarily a problem of people on the far left. Does that satisfy your need for definitions?
It’s odd that my political stances really haven’t changed much at all over the years (I’m 50) and yet I’ve gone from being a pinko commie for my support of universal health care, a smaller military, nuclear disarmament and equal treatment under the law for all people to a borderline neo-Nazi because I’m willing to call out bratty, childish behavior.
As for PaulBC, I’ve attended plenty of college lectures and still go to them on occasion even though I long since earned my degrees (though the parking situation can really suck at some campuses). Why, you might ask? Because I enjoy listening to smart people speak on certain subjects including history, physics, sociology and art. I especially like listening to speakers whom I may not agree with because they can still have valid points of view. Sometimes they might even say something that challenges my world view and <gasp!> changes my opinion.
@56 simonhadley
Which is apparently exceeded by the absurdity of your persecution complex. If us reprobate commies are shutting you down, we must not be doing a very good job at it, since you have plenty of opportunities to make your voice heard at length in all sorts of venues.
You could at least give us an example of something you sincerely believe that you aren’t allowed to say at a university.
simonhadley:
That perfectly describes this: “The establishment has been captured by an infuriating ideology (wokeness) which is contaminating even the most basic scientific and medical communication.”
And this: “If you’re going to be honest with yourself then you have to admit that today’s “wokeness” has gone beyond absurd.”
(Outrageous!)
“a lot of bullying being done by the left”…name a few. It’s kind of hard to rebut an accusation that vague.
simonhandley@56
I asked if you’d given one. Your phrase “Try giving a lecture at any university today” suggests expertise in the matter. It wouldn’t have to be direct experience, but without anything to back it up, it’s an unsupported assertion. I don’t get invited to give lectures. Hence, I have effectively no understanding what it entails. Neither do you. Neither does most of your presumed audience. That’s what makes it a lazy recitation of talking points. You’re simply assuming a major point of contention as if it’s a given.
I don’t see examples I can see for myself @56. I guess 50 was just waving around creationists to scare people.
This isn’t honest behavior.
On Youtube search for ‘college speakers shut down’ and you’ll get plenty of examples. The painful truth that people need to recognize is that you don’t have to be mean to be a bully, you just have to feel righteous.
@PaulBC: I misread you. No, I have not given a college lecture. I have had to give briefings to generals and colonels on a few occasions which was nerve wracking enough but at least I knew they were well behaved enough not to scream me out of the room if they disagreed with a QA assessment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHZoPI9JXbc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_eWqPKqCiw
So 62 wants me to go find the bullying in a link-drop instead of naming bullying behaviors and quoting and a timepoint. I have to go and find their claim. These feelings are useless without objects. Supposedly creationist like objects. I should be at least seeing a creationist behavior cited, and an analogous behavior cited.
Oversensitive.