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[ItWasMeantToBe19]

Chomsky is kind of a dickweed at times too though:

http://www.monbiot.com/2012/05/21/2181/

"Uhh, dude, why did you support a book denying the Rwandan genocide"

"America has committed genocide you idiot!"

"... Yes, I written about that and agree."

"What matters is that the neo-liberal elite ensure lack of questioning."

"... You're supporting a book that is denying the Rwandan genocide though."

"I am merely supporting the main thesis!"

"... But when you are willing to give support to a part of a book, you're kind of promoting all of it."

"I didn't even read the book!"


Noam falls back on stuff about American problems whenever he's questioned it seems. And America's problems are huge, real problems, but he uses whataboutism so defensively that it's hard not to roll your eyes at him sometimes.

 

[ibyea]

Huh? The purpose of profiling is not to tell a regular Muslim from a Muslim with terroristic intentions. It's to increase the probability of detecting people with potentially dangerous things (knifes, explosives, etc.) on their persons during regular security checks, by acknowledging that focusing on persons with certain characteristics (ethnicity, nationality, gender, age, etc.) increases that probability.

The goal is not to tell apart a terrorist from a regular person by profiling them, but to increase your chance to find dangerous people by focusing your efforts based on risk indicators.

Again, I do not think that this works well enough to warrant the potential alienation of well-intentioned people, but you can hardly allege a racist mode of thinking here. Every security force profiles. I've been searched far more often and throughly during security checks at several locations (concerts, etc.) than, for instance, my girlfriend, simply because males tend to be more violent than females.

That is a common fallacy called the base rate fallacy, and so profiling would practically be useless, and this is one which Sam Harris should know better.

 

[kyser73]

Sam Harris on 70 kids getting slaughtered:



"I know I talk almost exclusively about how cultural influence can cause violence, but really, this has to be a mental illness issue."

Also... Why are a Linguist and a Neuroscientist such large figures in this sociological debate instead of, you know, sociologists?

In Chomsky's case its because he's published far more about politics and his power-critique than he has linguistics, Harris because he's (arguably) a philosopher.

 

[excelsiorlef]

Sam Harris on 70 kids getting slaughtered:



"I know I talk almost exclusively about how cultural influence can cause violence, but really, this has to be a mental illness issue."

Also... Why are a Linguist and a Neuroscientist such large figures in this sociological debate instead of, you know, sociologists?

Wow he managed to turn a Christian terrorist attack into a rant about how the real tragedy is something sometime islam.

Jesus.

 

[ElTorro]

That is a common fallacy called the base rate fallacy, and so profiling would practically be useless, and this is one which Sam Harris should know better.

We are not discussing the effectiveness of profiling. I am not defending that. We are discussing whether Harris' point exhibits racist thinking.

 

[kess]

Noam falls back on stuff about American problems whenever he's questioned it seems. And America's problems are huge, real problems, but he uses whataboutism so defensively that it's hard not to roll your eyes at him sometimes.

Well his former denial of the Khmer Rouge massacres wasn't one of his better moments

 

[Malfunky]

omg. are you kidding?

Chomsky is a favourite boogeyman of the right in America. if anything, he's been at it so long, he's been pushed aside.

Praise of the American people from Chomsky.

One can disagree with Harris on many things, but if one calls him racist that person has clearly never read anything he has written.

He is demonstrably racist. It's undeniable. It's the entire basis of his out-dated clash of civilizations anti-Islam mentality. He's a neoliberal, faux-libertarian textbook xenophobe. And it's backed by a few quotes in this thread. Racism isn't purely defined by explicit hatred of another group of people. Anybody who thinks racism is exclusive to that clearly has no idea what racism is.

 

[RustyNails]

Are you asking how you profile someone to identify them as a Muslim? I don't know, and that wasn't his point.

Harris isn't saying "pick all Muslims out from the line and scrutinize them more."

WTF are you talking about. What does this quote mean?

"We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim"

How is he not saying profile Muslims?

He's saying that there is a certain profile of person that airports in 2015 may be on the lookout for more than others: see Technomancer's image. Harris himself isn't so far off the radar from this profile that he should be exempt, but the Amish mother with 3 children probably is, so if you can only pick out a handful of people for a random check, is it useful to pick them?

Technomancer's image is of 19 hijackers from Saudi Arabia. Now that we have checked 85 year old Norwegian grandmothers and Amish mothers with 3 children, how do you go about profiling Muslims? You are obviously struggling to say what you really want to say because you don't actually want to sound like a racist (surprise!). Sam Harris, the cuntlord he is, doesn't care. I wish you were as candid as he and described us how Muslims look like so we can profile them. We should do this for the sake of safety, because as we all know our country was founded on the principle of guilty until proven innocent.

Or on the basis that in modern times, that is the profile of people committing airplane-based acts of terror. Are you against authorities having a visual profile based on intelligence or past events? Are you saying that based on the image you linked, it doesn't make sense to apply less scrutiny to groups of people that we know jihadists aren't recruiting?

You raise important points, but we go back to my original question. The "visual profile" you just mentioned. I want to know what it looks like? Please describe.

 

[ibyea]

We are not discussing the effectiveness of profiling. I am not defending that. We are discussing whether Harris' point exhibits racist thinking.

That's my point. He is not thinking rationally about this because underlying all of it is xenophobia. He tries to couch things in nice terms, but every so often that prejudice of his leaks out of his mouth.

 

[pigeon]

On one hand, Chomsky seems to be right in his interpretation of the al-Shifa bombing. On the other hand, I have no idea why he felt he had to dodge Harris' very clear and simple question about the role of intent in moral decisions.

He doesn't dodge it. In one of the very first emails he sends, he comments that he already addressed the argument about intent in the original writing Harris responded to:

Most commentary on the Sudan bombing keeps to the question of whether the plant was believed to produce chemical weapons; true or false, that has no bearing on “the magnitude with which the aggression interfered with key values in the society attacked,” such as survival. Others point out that the killings were unintended, as are many of the atrocities we rightly denounce. In this case, we can hardly doubt that the likely human consequences were understood by US planners. The acts can be excused, then, only on the Hegelian assumption that Africans are “mere things,” whose lives have “no value,” an attitude that accords with practice in ways that are not overlooked among the victims, who may draw their own conclusions about the “moral orthodoxy of the West.”

In other words, if the question is whether we intended only to destroy a plant producing chemical weapons, the argument fails because we did far more damage to the people in the area than would be required to destroy the plant; if the question is whether we intended any of the people in the area to be hurt at all, the argument fails because the American military is not staffed by idiots, and it is unbelievable that they did not understand the consequences of their actions.

It is possible for you to take actions in pursuit of a noble intention that are still unjustified, or even exacerbated, by that intention. If I believe the guy living in the next apartment over is a serial killer, and as a result I blow up the apartment building we live in, my positive intention does not improve the situation. If anything, it makes it worse. If I had blown up the apartment building to kill everybody in it, at least I would be demonstrating a solid understanding of cause and effect! Blowing up a building to stop one killer means that nothing about my thought process can be trusted.

Harris's only response to this point is that he did not read the original text Chomsky wrote, but only an excerpt. In other words, he publically accuses Chomsky of not considering something in his text, Chomsky sends him the quote where he does so, and Harris's response is "lol didn't read but seriously what about intent?" I can hardly blame Chomsky for not taking him seriously at that point.

 

[Dude Abides]

Are you asking how you profile someone to identify them as a Muslim? I don't know, and that wasn't his point.

Harris isn't saying "pick all Muslims out from the line and scrutinize them more." He's saying that there is a certain profile of person that airports in 2015 may be on the lookout for more than others: see Technomancer's image. Harris himself isn't so far off the radar from this profile that he should be exempt, but the Amish mother with 3 children probably is, so if you can only pick out a handful of people for a random check, is it useful to pick them?

And again, this is in addition to every other cue that someone trained in this field would be looking for.



Or on the basis that in modern times, that is the profile of people committing airplane-based acts of terror. Are you against authorities having a visual profile based on intelligence or past events? Are you saying that based on the image you linked, it doesn't make sense to apply less scrutiny to groups of people that we know jihadists aren't recruiting?

I don't really understand why we should care about this to any significant extent. Even assuming that by profiling for Muslimse could somewhat improve our screening. Is there actually a problem where our refusal to profile is letting people slip through who shouldn't?

 

[Chichikov]

My dislike of Sam Harris continue to grow.
I understand why Chomsky is pissed, Harris take a rather off the cuffs remark that is most likely wasn't even directed at him and try to leverage to a public fight on a narrow point he think he can win.

Bah.

And for the record, Chomsky is right, nationalism is more dangerous than religion.

 

[ponpo]

You raise important points, but we go back to my original question. The "visual profile" you just mentioned. I want to know what it looks like? Please describe.

What it looks like - something similar to or in the realm of the 19 people in the hijacker photoset. Harris included.

What it doesn't look like - Norwegian grandmothers, Amish children, anyone else who, as far as intelligence shows - jihadists aren't recruiting. In Harris' experience, a mid-eighties person in a wheelchair, a three year old wearing sandals. Who else? Korean families? I don't know.

I suppose you're asking for absolutely zero profiling then, since I'm not sure what criteria you would include if you wanted any form of it.

I don't really understand why we should care about this to any significant extent. Even assuming that by profiling for Muslimse could somewhat improve our screening. Is there actually a problem where our refusal to profile is letting people slip through who shouldn't?

Probably not. Personally I don't think it matters. I think Harris elsewhere stated that if another terrorist plane event took place and the perpetrator fit the 'jihadist profile', could it have been avoided if security focus wasn't being wasted on people who are obviously not jihadists.

 

[Pusherman]

You only have to look at Harris's unquestioned support of the state of Israel to see that it is racism that belies most of his believes. Anyone who thinks religion, and Islam in particular, forms the greatest threats to the modern world but simultaneously supports a country that is literally in the midst of an ethnic cleansing and whose origin is literally entirely predicated on religion is a hypocritical racist.

 

[RustyNails]

What it looks like - something similar to or in the realm of the 19 people in the hijacker photoset. Harris included.

Soo, we should profile Arabs. Got it. Because those 19 people are Arabs from a single country. Or am I off? It'd be easier if you described in your post what Muslims look like instead of telling us to look at a picture.

 

[entremet]

My dislike of Sam Harris continue to grow.
I understand why Chomsky is pissed, Harris take a rather off the cuffs remark that is most likely wasn't even directed at him and try to leverage to a public fight on a narrow point he think he can win.

Bah.

And for the record, Chomsky is right, nationalism is more dangerous than religion.

Chomsky has actually had strong criticism of the Harris and Hitchens before:

http://disinfo.com/2012/08/noam-cho...r-hitchens-and-sam-harris-religious-fanatics/

 

[excelsiorlef]

Soo, we should profile Arabs. Got it. Because those 19 people are Arabs from a single country. Or am I off? It'd be easier if you described in your post what Muslims look like instead of telling us to look at a picture.

They look like the enemy RustyNails, the enemy.

I mean that is basically Harris' thinking he just dresses it up in hyper rationalism.

 

[Triplicates]

Sam Harris has made many points that I find at least partially agreeable but here came off hopelessly naive about the purity of the intent of American foreign policy.

 

[Kiritsugu]

He doesn't dodge it. In one of the very first emails he sends, he comments that he already addressed the argument about intent in the original writing Harris responded to:


In other words, if the question is whether we intended only to destroy a plant producing chemical weapons, the argument fails because we did far more damage to the people in the area than would be required to destroy the plant; if the question is whether we intended any of the people in the area to be hurt at all, the argument fails because the American military is not staffed by idiots, and it is unbelievable that they did not understand the consequences of their actions.

It is possible for you to take actions in pursuit of a noble intention that are still unjustified, or even exacerbated, by that intention. If I believe the guy living in the next apartment over is a serial killer, and as a result I blow up the apartment building we live in, my positive intention does not improve the situation. If anything, it makes it worse. If I had blown up the apartment building to kill everybody in it, at least I would be demonstrating a solid understanding of cause and effect! Blowing up a building to stop one killer means that nothing about my thought process can be trusted.

Harris's only response to this point is that he did not read the original text Chomsky wrote, but only an excerpt. In other words, he publically accuses Chomsky of not considering something in his text, Chomsky sends him the quote where he does so, and Harris's response is "lol didn't read but seriously what about intent?" I can hardly blame Chomsky for not taking him seriously at that point.

All those words and then at the end you implicitly admit that he did dodge the question, you just can't blame him for doing so!

I didn't argue that Harris was right and Chomsky was wrong about the historical case. I pointed out that Chomsky could have said, "Yes, intent makes a difference when judging the morality of an action", or "No, intent makes no difference.", but he never did. Instead he repeated that everyone can pretend to have good intentions, that professed intentions mean nothing, that everyone has good intentions, etc.

My guess is that the reason Chomsky won't state his philosophical position is that he knows that his position is weak. In other words, Harris has correctly identified something very wrong with Chomsky's writing, he just picked the wrong example.

 

[Chichikov]

Chomsky has actually had strong criticism of the Harris and Hitchens before:

http://disinfo.com/2012/08/noam-cho...r-hitchens-and-sam-harris-religious-fanatics/

That's the same video that Harris referenced in their exchange and it's the one I was talking about.
This is just an answer to really poorly worded question and I don't think he was even talking about Sam Harris here (Chomsky says as much too).
In any case, that's such a poor excuse to get as butthurt as he does, though really, I think he's just trying to ride Chomsky coattails here, which make his "well you're a meanie, I'm leaving the thread, but for the record, you didn't win, I won" reply all the more hilarious.
Seriously, that some gaming side meltdown stuff.

 

[RK9039]

And for the record, Chomsky is right, nationalism is more dangerous than religion.

"Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious."

 

[leadbelly]

Noam Chomsky = anti-American
Sam Harris = Racist.

lol

The simplicity in which some people interpret the world around them staggers me sometimes.

 

[Prine]

That's the same video that Harris referenced in their exchange and it's the one I was talking about.
This is just an answer to really poorly worded question and I don't think he was even talking about Sam Harris here (Chomsky says as much too).
In any case, that's such a poor excuse to get as butthurt as he does, though really, I think he's just trying to ride Chomsky coattails here, which make his "well you're a meanie, I'm leaving the thread, but for the record, you didn't win, I won" reply all the more hilarious.
Seriously, that some gaming side meltdown stuff.

Indeed, in Sams words “I’m still struggling to understand.” It was an intellectual mismatch, Chomsky was right to be direct after Sam baiting him. This sums up my feelings after reading the exchange.

Harris opens the dialog with a lengthy passage from his book where he essentially says Chomsky is an idiot, then gets all huffy when Chomsky is occasionally short with him. Overall, when Chomsky asks Harris questions, Harris refuses to answer and then expresses puzzlement. As for the issues: When Chomsky does answer Harris’s questions about intentions, Harris then paints a rosy picture of US intentions through an analogy, and then, when challenged, retreats to claiming it was all just a thought experiment which had nothing to do with the US. When Chomsky says, well, then, let’s discuss the actual intentions in question, Harris says you should just accept a country’s claims of benevolent intentions on their face, without evidence. Chomsky points out that this would get most dictatorships off the hook, and adds that it might even be the case that some dictatorships actually believe they have good intentions when they carry out their crimes against humanity — does that mean that we should then ignore their crimes against humanity? Harris basically ignores that point but in effect insists that we should simply accept the US’s stated good intentions without evidence, and stop our moral analysis of the US, a least, with those stated intentions. The fact that Harris actually insisted on publishing this sad exchange anyway does make me suspect that he wasn’t just pretending to be puzzled and in fact had no idea what was going on in the conversation.

 

[leadbelly]

Sam Harris has made many points that I find at least partially agreeable but here came off hopelessly naive about the purity of the intent of American foreign policy.

I will say actually, Sam Harris doesn't actually believe there is always a purity of intent when it comes to American foreign policy. He has stated there are certain things Chomsky and Greenwald have said that he agrees with.

He does seem to downplay it at times though. I've seen him do that with drone strikes, which is something I disagree with personally. Sam Harris has made good points about Islam, but I do think he downplays the extent in which American foreign policy has had an influence on extremism also. This is where I tend to agree with Chomsky.

 

[captainnapalm]

As if I needed more reason to dislike Sam Harris. But thanks for providing it. Keep fighting the good fight, new atheists.

 

[Arkeband]

I usually really enjoy listening to Harris philosophize. (whether I think he's right or wrong)

However this exchange was probably best left in his inbox.

 

[ponpo]

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/final-thoughts-on-chomsky

A short 10 minute podcast as final thoughts on the conversation for those interested.

 

[Foffy]

My dislike of Sam Harris continue to grow.
I understand why Chomsky is pissed, Harris take a rather off the cuffs remark that is most likely wasn't even directed at him and try to leverage to a public fight on a narrow point he think he can win.

Bah.

And for the record, Chomsky is right, nationalism is more dangerous than religion.

Usually both are bad toxins, but the real poison comes when they're mixed. You love an arbitrary land for an arbitrary book of words, and when you mix those two, you really become a problem in the world. I would argue the problems of nationalism are inherited from religious ideas: a guaranteed saved or good against a guaranteed damned or evil. These egoic projections come form the basis of a duality in the world, and religion is the major domain that implies even the organism has a duality, by having a soul/self/ego. That creates issues for the free will/bootstraps concepts people hold so highly in society, too.

For which one is worse, it depends a lot on the geography. In America, I think nationalism is bad because it's gone to such extremes it's caused suffering amongst so many people even in its borders, yet religion has its major uh ohs with Boko Haram and the like.

 

[Chichikov]

I will say actually, Sam Harris doesn't actually believe there is always a purity of intent when it comes to American foreign policy. He has stated there are certain things Chomsky and Greenwald have said that he agrees with.

He does seem to downplay it at times though. I've seen him do that with drone strikes, which is something I disagree with personally. Sam Harris has made good points about Islam, but I do think he downplays the extent in which American foreign policy has had an influence on extremism also. This is where I tend to agree with Chomsky.

I think the main point that Chomsky make about intent is that if you're doing something that is likely to hurt innocent people (and over time, it's statistically guaranteed that it will) saying that you didn't mean it are rather empty words.
When you engage in something like the US's drone campaign, you are making a choice knowing full well that innocents will die.
When you say it's unintentional you merely saying that you didn't kill as many civilians as you could, which is true, and I guess a good thing, but that doesn't give you a pass from justifying that program's price in innocent civilian life.

 

[Buzzman]

What the fuck happened here?

Suddenly Sam Harris is no longer a bigoted asshole and profiling arabs/muslims/non-whites is A-okay!

 

[BocoDragon]

What the fuck happened here?

Suddenly Sam Harris is no longer a bigoted asshole and profiling arabs/muslims/non-whites is A-okay!

You've just watered down the concept of a "bigot" until it is useless. Good job.

 

[Tesseract]

harris is not chomsky level, the next best closest is feynman

 

[orochi91]

What the fuck happened here?

Suddenly Sam Harris is no longer a bigoted asshole and profiling arabs/muslims/non-whites is A-okay!

Nah, Harris is still quite the bigoted asshole, always has been.

I feel he may have something worthwhile to say occasionally, but the extreme stances he takes against Muslims actively undermines his credibility.

I just can't take him seriously anymore :/

 

[Foffy]

harris is not chomsky level, the next best closest is feynman

B-but he's dead. ):

 

[Tesseract]

B-but he's dead. ):

that's how big the gulf is

one is a once / century polymath (of his kind), the other is samsung harrison ford

i like sam, but c'mon dewds ...

 

[BocoDragon]

Harris' stance is what is says on the tin:

"Islam contains bad ideas that often, but not always influence people towards bad behaviour"

If that view is automatically what makes someone a bigot, then so be it, he's a bigot.

Personally I think that's a very valid viewpoint.

....That is, if you aren't on the liberal thought police, or a muslim who had this identity placed upon them and can't separate criticism of a flawed human ideology from an attack on the personal identity of themselves and their family and culture.

I don't think Harris is my model thinker, but in between those who find themselves hurt by his ideas, and those who fancy themselves overzealous liberal guardians against bigotry, I think he gets a lot of shit - and made out to be a mythical "bad person" - for making cogent points that people need to hear and consider.

There are certainly clumsy edges on many of his points - he does talk a lot... but this "he's a bigot".. sorry guys, but it sounds like a fantasy to me....

 

[Foffy]

that's how big the gulf is

one is a once / century polymath (of his kind), the other is samsung harrison ford

i like sam, but c'mon dewds ...

We had a couple of polymath folk in the 20th century. Kinda sad to see in the 21st, we have nobody even on the same level of their works. I'm personally interested in the conversations about the illusion of ego more than anything else, but we had people like Alan Watts and Jiddu Krishnamurti talking about that in the 20th. The 21st has Sam Harris - who doesn't talk about it enough, as there's some great arguments to be made there to debunk theology without even getting to the problems of its claims, even if his recent book is his first public attempt to talk about the ego myth - and Eckhart Tolle, who is popular because of the Oprah factor, and considered very New Age as a result. That domain has kind of become unmoved in about 30 years outside of neurology backing up the basic claims of no thinker to a thought. We're still stuck as a society on free will due to this void.

For the topic Harris and Chomsky were talking about, I legitimately can't even think of anyone on Chomsky's level. He's almost isolated in that domain, having the whole court to himself. When he's no longer around, we might have yet another void unfilled, and that's always tragic to see.

 

[freethought]

Man, don't argue with Noam Chomsky about anything. But if you really must, if you absolutely have to get into an argument with Noam Chomky, might I suggest avoiding the topics of linguistics and US foreign policy.

It was interesting to see Harris consistently avoid engaging Chomsky in any way, shape or form. Mainly because there is no honest comeback to anything he says other than "I trust everything the US Government says implicitly, even when it provides no evidence to back up its claims" or "I don't care about the death of non-Americans".

This part of his postscript was particularly dishonest:

I consider his related claims that virtually everyone professes benign intentions, and that such professions are generally meaningless, to be false.

This is a falsifiable claim about the public comments and justifications for horrendous acts. Harris' considerations don't come into it. Can anyone think of a single dictator or mass-murderer who publicly claimed to be malevolent or evil? Even Hitler wasn't so brazen. What's more, while Chomsky's claim that it's impossible to really gauge a person's sincerity is correct, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Hitler really did believe he was a benign ruler and he genuinely believed the Jews were irrevocably evil.

Of course, as Chomsky points out, we dismiss these claims regardless of their sincerity. Just as we dismiss the claims of the US Government regarding the justification for the invasion of Iraq or the bombing of the Al-Shifa plant or any one of hundreds of military interventions.

I would disagree with Chomsky about which is the more evil act. I'd argue the intentional killing is the greater crime (at least in regards to genocide) but that is a debate worth having in my opinion and I'm not sure that my position is the correct one. He himself seems unwilling to fully make that claim so perhaps we don't really disagree after all.

edit: It's particularly telling that his one mention of Chomsky's claim in the e-mail exchange is very deferential and he looks willing to give up some ground but then in the postscript he just slams it down with no further thought or (seemingly) research. It's really hard to imagine why Chomsky wasn't interested in debating him.

 

[King Tubby]

What it looks like - something similar to or in the realm of the 19 people in the hijacker photoset. Harris included.

What it doesn't look like - Norwegian grandmothers, Amish children, anyone else who, as far as intelligence shows - jihadists aren't recruiting. In Harris' experience, a mid-eighties person in a wheelchair, a three year old wearing sandals. Who else? Korean families? I don't know.

I'm not one of those people who reflexively dismisses Harris - I disagree with him on many things and agree with him on other things - but I can't help but read this as dancing around what is really being said.

What is "similar to or in the realm of" that photoset? Brown skinned people who appear to be of Middle-Eastern origin. The concept that Sam Harris would claim to be part of those being profiled in this case, and that therefore it's acceptable for him to call for such profiling, is laughable just by virtue of the name on his passport reading Sam Harris.

Your examples of the absurdities that racial profiling would avoid - and let us make no mistake, what we are talking about here is racial profiling - are red herrings. Hey, maybe we shouldn't consider an elderly Norwegian grandmother as worthy of a search as a Yemeni 30-year-old man...but you've introduced additional factors of gender and age. Same for the Amish children, the wheelchair-bound elderly person (an added dose of able profiling), a toddler.

If you were to give the TSA and border patrol and the like an official policy that they can profile against people who seem like the type that might be jihadists or jihadists are recruiting, you are de facto telling them to engage in racial profiling. To claim otherwise is simply naive, and given that the deadliest act of terrorism in the United States prior to 9/11 was perpetrated by a white male, seems terribly misguided as well.

 

[Tim the Wiz]

Harris came out the loser of that exchange, IMO. His obsession with the optics of his "rational" persona seems to outweigh all else.

 

[Tesseract]

We had a couple of polymath folk in the 20th century. Kinda sad to see in the 21st, we have nobody even on the same level of their works. I'm personally interested in the conversations about the illusion of ego more than anything else, but we had people like Alan Watts and Jiddu Krishnamurti talking about that in the 20th. The 21st has Sam Harris - who doesn't talk about it enough, as there's some great arguments to be made there to debunk theology without even getting to the problems of its claims, even if his recent book is his first public attempt to talk about the ego myth - and Eckhart Tolle, who is popular because of the Oprah factor, and considered very New Age as a result. That domain has kind of become unmoved in about 30 years outside of neurology backing up the basic claims of no thinker to a thought. We're still stuck as a society on free will due to this void.

For the topic Harris and Chomsky were talking about, I legitimately can't even think of anyone on Chomsky's level. He's almost isolated in that domain, having the whole court to himself. When he's no longer around, we might have yet another void unfilled, and that's always tragic to see.

great post, spot on.

 

[Monocle]

Harris' stance is what is says on the tin:

"Islam contains bad ideas that often, but not always influence people towards bad behaviour"

If that view is automatically what makes someone a bigot, then so be it, he's a bigot.

Personally I think that's a very valid viewpoint.

....That is, if you aren't on the liberal thought police, or a muslim who had this identity placed upon them and can't separate criticism of a flawed human ideology from an attack on the personal identity of themselves and their family and culture.

I don't think Harris is my model thinker, but in between those who find themselves hurt by his ideas, and those who fancy themselves overzealous liberal guardians against bigotry, I think he gets a lot of shit - and made out to be a mythical "bad person" - for making cogent points that people need to hear and consider.

There are certainly clumsy edges on many of his points - he does talk a lot... but this "he's a bigot".. sorry guys, but it sounds like a fantasy to me....

Yep, pretty much.

 

[WinFonda]

It's amazing their egos managed to make room for all that brain.

Harris is the loser if for no other reason than I believe he wished to publish this correspondence from the outset. And what we got is two smart people talking past each other and being bitchy . It was a vainglorious exchange and Harris's desire to make it public for mob scrutiny comes off as self-serving, aggrandizing, and weird. Should've stayed private.

 

[Tesseract]

It's amazing their egos managed to make room for all that brain.

Harris is the loser if for no other reason than I believe he wished to publish this correspondence from the outset. And what we got is two smart people talking past each other and being bitchy . It was a vainglorious exchange and Harris's desire to make it public for mob scrutiny comes off as self-serving, aggrandizing, and weird. Should've stayed private.

the amount of balls it takes to do that to chomsky, you better be right.

 

[Business]

Technomancer's image is of 19 hijackers from Saudi Arabia. Now that we have checked 85 year old Norwegian grandmothers and Amish mothers with 3 children, how do you go about profiling Muslims? You are obviously struggling to say what you really want to say because you don't actually want to sound like a racist (surprise!). Sam Harris, the cuntlord he is, doesn't care. I wish you were as candid as he and described us how Muslims look like so we can profile them. We should do this for the sake of safety, because as we all know our country was founded on the principle of guilty until proven innocent.

I think the profiling idea is a bad one because even if I think Sam Harris could be proposing it in good faith, at the end of the day it does create a social problem where certain individuals are targeted, stigmatized or humilliated in public. To avoid that I think it's good to keep scanning the Norwegian grandma, also because you never know when you'll find a crazy one.

Having said that I also wonder why it's so hard for you to imagine an obviously muslim looking person without having to resort to him/her looking middle eastern. If I see the guy below in the street it will be beyond obvious to me he is muslim, and race will not be remotely part of it.

You belive the guy you are discussing with is a racist and are really trying really hard to make him say what you expect to hear, which makes the bolded a bit ironic.

 

[Derwind]

How do you profile an ideology? Thats really what I feel this comes to.

Do terrorist come in the cartoony, religious zealot variety?

 

[hal9001]

Two guys stroking their on egos.

 

[King Tubby]

Having said that I also wonder why it's so hard for you to imagine an obviously muslim looking person without having to resort to him/her looking middle eastern. If I see the guy below in the street it will be beyond obvious to me he is muslim, and race will not be remotely part of it.

If the pictured man shaved his beard and took off the kufi would you ever suspect him of being a Muslim? Do you think inspectors at airports would? Of course not. A Middle-Eastern person would have to change their name and develop vitiligo universalis.

 

[BocoDragon]

It's amazing their egos managed to make room for all that brain.

Harris is the loser if for no other reason than I believe he wished to publish this correspondence from the outset. And what we got is two smart people talking past each other and being bitchy . It was a vainglorious exchange and Harris's desire to make it public for mob scrutiny comes off as self-serving, aggrandizing, and weird. Should've stayed private.

I do agree that publishing personal correspondence is a bit weird. Chomsky's reaction echoes how I'd react... I wouldn't object, but I'd say it's odd.

It's not entirely without merit... there probably is value in airing all your dirty laundry so that some sense can be made of it by society at large. I don't think it's all about making himself look good... I genuinely think he's very geeky about having open and honest discourse, to a fault. But it steps on the toes of social niceties.

I get the impression that Harris is becoming this very Socretian figure, in that his aggressive pursuit of intellectual inquiry goes against so many social mores, and it kind of starts to piss people off. I think he's right to do it, and yet I frequently cringe at the results. On a ideal level I do think it's best that social niceties are done away with in the pursuit of truth.

 

[Nivash]

It's amazing their egos managed to make room for all that brain.

Harris is the loser if for no other reason than I believe he wished to publish this correspondence from the outset. And what we got is two smart people talking past each other and being bitchy . It was a vainglorious exchange and Harris's desire to make it public for mob scrutiny comes off as self-serving, aggrandizing, and weird. Should've stayed private.

Yeah, I got the impression that they approach these questions from such radically different starting points that they can't even find a common battleground. I suppose Harris tried to establish some kind of consensus in the start but he chose the wrong way to do it.

Harris "loses" by default. He's the challenger because he was the one to initiate the engagement so all Chomsky had to do was not make a complete fool of himself to "win". That's just how debates like these work.

As for why he published it, I think that comes from him priding himself on intellectual honesty and transparency - he said he was going to publish it and so he did, even if he didn't stand to gain from it. I actually think that he really wanted to have a fruitful discussion with Chomsky and was disappointed it went the way it did.