JRPC wrote:

Calling Sam Harris a bigot however WHICH YOU JUST DID, is the textbook example of ad hominem. Given that you've literally just told me that personal attacks are a poor substitute for an actaully argument I guess now you'd like to retract that and maybe, I dunno, apolgoise to me? Unless you're just spouting random shit for effect of course?

Brooks wrote:

Lots of American kids being very publicly pissed off today, good for them.

JRPC wrote:

Everyone seems to be appealing to this idea that Harris is simply out of his league here and therefore wrong from the oputset. Chomsky's credentials alone are enough and nothing else needs to be said. Well if you're happy with that then fine. I'd be very happy not to talk about either of these men anymore.

SpaceGazelle wrote:

Stuff Harris is right about imo:

Religion being rubbish and A.I being scary. 

He seems perversely upset with Islam to the point of sounding like a cunt, which basically makes him a cunt. You can't pick on one more than the others for being worse. That's yer basic racism right there, with no regard for history, poverty, common sense and the awfulness of the Christian cunts that fucked everything up in the first place.

JRPC wrote:

Everyone seems to be appealing to this idea that Harris is simply out of his league here and therefore wrong from the oputset. Chomsky's credentials alone are enough and nothing else needs to be said. Well if you're happy with that then fine. I'd be very happy not to talk about either of these men anymore.

Chomsky(4-27) does not agree.“The bombing of al-Shifa was an immediate response to the Embassy bombings,” he writes, “which is why it is almost universally assumed to be retaliation.  It is inconceivable that in that brief interim period evidence was found that it was a chemical weapons factory, and properly evaluated to justify a bombing.”

“I do not, again, claim that Clinton intentionally wanted to kill the thousands of victims,” Chomsky states.  “Rather, that was probably of no concern, raising the very serious ethical question that I have discussed, again repeatedly in this correspondence.  And again, I have often discussed the ethical question about the significance of real or professed intentions, for about 50 years in fact, discussing real cases, where there are possible and meaningful answers.  Something clearly worth doing, since the real ethical issues are interesting and important ones.”

Harris (4-27) responds, “Noam, I am hard pressed to understand the uncharitable attitude—really bordering on contempt—conveyed by almost everything you have written thus far.”

“Your dismissal of an idealized thought experiment as ‘embarrassing and ludicrous,’ and your insistence upon focusing on real-world cases about which our intelligence is murky is not helping to clarify things.”

“You say that you are NOT claiming, ‘Clinton intentionally wanted to kill thousands of victims.’ Okay. But you seem to be suggesting that he had every reason to expect that he would be killing them by his actions (and just didn’t care). And you seem disinclined to distinguish the ethics of these cases.

Harris then states, “Perhaps we can rank order the callousness and cruelty here.”  He provides three cases: “1. al-Qaeda wanted and intended to kill thousands of innocent people—and did so; 2.  Clinton … wanted to destroy a valuable pharmaceutical plant. But he knew that he would bekilling thousands of people, and he simply didn’t care; and 3. Clinton … wanted to destroy what he believed to be a chemical weapons factory. But he did wind up killing innocent people, and we don’t really know how he felt about it.”

Harris does not include in his hierarchy of callousness and cruelty that the attack by al-Qaeda targeted the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the Capitol Building or White House, with the intention of causing serious damage to the U.S. political-military-financial complex, which would have had cascading negative repercussions throughout the world with the potential for global chaos.

Instead Harris pursues his linear argument. “Is it safe to assume that you view these three cases, as I do,” he writes, “as demonstrating descending degrees of evil?”

Harris makes dangerous assumptions that have lethal conclusions. Here it is the killing babies argument – babies die because evil intent can be ordered. The problem is that if such evil acts can be ordered then the killing of babies can be explained away. “They did that, so we did this, and that is more evil than this. We feel bad about it, so it’s okay.” It is a dead-end immoral argument.

And yet, here in the U.S. this type of discourse is commonplace. In the U.S. we sort and rank order just about everything. Such linear thinking is commonplace in the corridors of power, the military, and the media, from Fox News to NPR to talking heads on the Internet. It is the fill-in-the-bubble we are better than them mentality that pervades U.S. society. It is endemic.

legaldinho wrote:

For others who are yet salvageable, I tend not to waste time on Sam Harris, but this article sums up the snideness of the business Sam Harris is into. And make no mistake, man is about making dolla off a very old, very pernicious tendency of white (mostly men) trying to justify their superiority scientifically. He is very careful not to say anything racist but the veneer is thinner than dick skin https://the-orbit.net/progpub/2017/05/04/sam-harris-racist/

monkey wrote:

Religion is just a set of ideas and the harmfulness of each religion can be traced back to the specific doctrines of each.

This is absolute bullshit.

Yeah this is getting into the realms of the BNP and England First and those clowns. Islam is inherently violent, only white man religions allow peace, please ignore the centuries of Christ-fuelled bloodshed. Although I’m certain JPRC has stumbled into this unwittingly and not a terrible bad man.

Kow wrote:

I would posit that JP is one of the few people on here who is actually religious and therefore not keen on the idea that all religions are equally bad. Which is a fair enough angle to come from, I guess.