You should listen to this podcast by NiceMangos in which she tears into multiple episodes of his blog, in particular a joint appearance by Harris and Eric Weinstein. Yikes. The amount of cringe those two generate is not helping with Minnesota’s squish problem.
There’s also this article on NYMag.
I’m very late to the ass-kicking party. My excuse is that I have a serious aversion to Harris.
From the NYMag article:
Over the course of an hour, Harris laid out his views on Israel and why its present war with Hamas must be understood as a battle between “savagery and civilization.”
Isn’t this exactly what Ayn Rand said? Israel is modern and civilized, Arabs are swarthy heathen savages who need to be fought back, tamed, restrained, walled off from polite society, at least until they agreed to give up their savage ways; therefore we (meaning civilized white Westerners) must always support Israel because Israel is always right.
He earned it.
I’d never heard of Sam Harris when I read his book, The End of Faith.
I got halfway through the book, said, “This is garbage”, and put it down.
I can’t even remember the last time I didn’t finish a book.
It was mostly Islamophobic anti-Muslim ranting and raving.
I can’t even say it was all that wrong.
But it had nothing to do with us in the USA.
Muslims aren’t our problem!!!
We have our own Muslims.
We call them fundie xians and they are every bit as scary as the Muslim extremists they resemble.
However, our Muslim equivalent isn’t Over There wrecking their societies, they are Over Here, wrecking our society, the one I live in.
They are our problem.
I’ve never seen anything since that says that Sam Harris isn’t an idiot and garden variety hate merchant.
His other claim to fame is coming up with unrealistic scenarios to try and rationalize his hate and bigotry. It’s just plain cuckoo.
You have a gun in your hand pointed at a kitten.
If you don’t kill the kitten, a Muslim will drop an atomic bomb on New York City and kill 3 million people.
What do you do, one dead innocent kitten or 3 million dead Americans.
What you do is pet the kitten and give it some food.
There is no gun, no Muslim, and no atomic bomb.
This is all a sick product of Sam Harris’s sick mind.
Oh yeah, I totally forgot about Sam Harris’s brilliant “thought experiments”…why they were almost as ingenious as those “wizard and nuke” “thought experiments” we heard from rape apologists… [eyeroll]
I suffered through the Triggernometry episode, especially Weinstein’s part. I haven’t listened to podcasts for a bit and lost track of Eiynah. I recall her critical arc on Sam Harris.
Harris pissed me off with The Moral Landscape. He tries to come across as super profound, but he’s not. The ASMR quality of his voice has too many freethinkers mesmerized into his thought cult.
Maybe moral genius Harris can give us the rundown on:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_Directive
Which BSG seemed to have addressed a bit here:
But if taking out your own in a twist on “take no prisoners” becoming “allow no prisoners” isn’t dark enough for you there is always:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_Option
Jaw falls off and hits floor.
Hemidactylus:
Why? It’s obviously a deterrent. Hardly a new one.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lam_chau_(doctrine)
From PZ’s OP this opinion piece by Eric Levitz:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/11/sam-harriss-fairy-tale-account-of-the-israel-hamas-conflict.html
Sounds somewhat familiar. Hmmm…oh yeah. While invoking West Side Story friend of the blog Steven Pinker in an essay “The Fear of Determinism” found in the book Are we free? : psychology and free will (by John Baer, James C. Kaufman, Roy F. Baumeister) quoted it:
Pinker laments:
That’s gotta go over well elsewhere…see below…
Returning to the critique of Sam Harris PZ linked by Eric Levitz:
To which I would ask anyone interested to keyword search the comments section on another blog for very interesting asides on ethnic cleansing:
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/01/26/civilian-participation-in-hamass-october-7-massacre/#comment-2079214
Or:
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/01/26/civilian-participation-in-hamass-october-7-massacre/#comment-2079088
Yeah. Seems to be in the air so to speak. Not any discernible official push back so maybe that’s acceptable discourse there? Yet PZ gets dragged there often enough.
Sam Harris on “why do you never criticize Israel” my line by line dissection at [stderr]
Harris is a sloppy thinker, who equates all Palestinian resistance with Hamas, in spite of the fact that Hamas did not exist until relatively recently, and Israel’s territorial expansion significantly pre-dates it.
It is literally chock full of bullshit, like this tidbit:
My interpretation is that Harris is an ignorant hack, who has absorbed the perception that Israel dates from post-WWII, when, in fact, it does not at all. The reality of the creation of Israel is much, much more complicated than Harris appears to believe, which one supposes allows him to adopt simplistic and convenient attitudes.
No, PeeZ, we think you’re not mean enough to Sam…