Some good points made by Harris here.
Peterson, Harris, etc....
- Thread starter prath92
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Shaprio's logic that there are guardrails in place to stop Trump from doing all the bad stuff is ridiculous given who is on the Supreme Court.
That was 2 hour well spent. Harris was great as always. He particulary nailed it on the election (the choice is simple, you cannot vote for big lie).
Yeah, Harris made some good points. Shapiro's argument seemed a combination of whataboutism and GOP talking points.
Tbh kinda hate Harris lowering himself to a discussion with Shapiro, but yeah he's good on the election in general.
They were all dreadful on Israel. The host couldn't hide her own bias and Harris also sucked off the IDF. He said they have a 1 to 1 combatant civilian ratio.
I think it is a good thing if Shapiro receives pushback in such civilized manner as Harris can provide. Can you imagine the circus if the opponent would be for example Cenk? We need centrists like Harris in public discourse as much as possible. Even if it means debating people on both edges of the spectrum.
Why do you think he enjoyed it so much
Not surprising. Harris is pretty Islamophobic.
He is not.
Yeah it's one of, if not the main reason I stopped listening to him. Used to be a big fan but he has his blind spots especially when it comes to Islam. Not to say there isn't plenty to criticize Islam especially the fundamentalist variety of but he does take it too far.
Disagree with this. You don't beat Shapiro by engaging him, however you do it. It only legitimised him. He's not worth the time or effort.
Same. If you listened to his podcast over time you could actually watch him go deeper and deeper down the Islamophobic rabbit hole. Which is a pity because I do think he’s interesting when he isn’t banging that particular drum.
I don't think the goal is to beat Shapiro per se. Of course such discussion doesn't change his positions or positions of his hardcore followers. But for people who are closer to the center it is good to have an opportunity to see that there is an alternative. It is a slow process but at the end of the day it is worth it, in my opinion.
He is.
Very similar to my feelings. His painting of Islam with such a broad brush definitely clouds any of that discussion. On most other topics I really enjoy his work though.
Sam Harris got twentysomething years of video and writing to his name and the only thing people who claim him to be islamophobic, whatever the word is ment to mean, can point to, is a few lines of text, out of context and videos, out of context..
That's not really true, though.
In his own words
When your argument is "Samuel Huntington isn't quite bigoted enough for my tastes" it's not a great thing.
There's plenty more wildly, bloodthirsty Zionism in the article too.
Is it your position that one can't criticize a religion, actions or practices grounded in religion, or compare and contrast between modern secular cultures and religious ones ?
It's interesting how many people loved his earlier work, especially his mission 'to demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms', but then condemned him when he started going after Islam.
It's almost as if that is, and always was, the most important thing to him!
I've read a few of Harris' books. I think one of the takeaways with atheists (or new atheists) is a strong criticism of religion across the board, especially in situations when it impinges on ordinary secular culture in the west. Within that framework, and certainly over the past quarter century, there are different gradations of criticism surrounding different religions and secular western society, especially in the post 9/11 world, which gets to the heart of focusing on one religion more than others. This is also true of others like Dawkins, Hitchens, and a number of the other so called new athiests.
With Islam he was always much more eager to go after Muslims than the intellectual and moral pretensions of religion itself.
I can't see it. What's islamaphobic about any of that?
His early work is trash as well. His writings about Christianity is vacuous masturbatory stuff for atheists, his free will book is sophmoric, and his attempts at morality not even that.
On Islam and Muslims he's very different, though. You don't even need to get into what he really means when he says that Europe is dying for demographic reasons, when he calls for ethnic profiling of Muslims, when he champions the Eurabia conspiracy theory, when he talks about the possibility of Muslims causing a civil war in France that will be the deadliest war in Europe since WW2.
He straight up says that Muslims are untrustworthy because they are Muslims. It's bigotry so explicit that if Harris isn't one, then no one is.
It’s always amusing to me when people (claim to have) read multiple books by someone who they’re adamant is an absolutely terrible writer. How many books do you need to read before deciding you hate their stuff? Hours and hours of life wasted doing something you know in advance you’re going to hate. All so you can win online arguments about this person in the future? Such a strange lifestyle choice.
I've read a few, but don't think he's a terrible writer. Did someone else say he's a prolific author ?
I’ve read one of his book. The one about Free Will. Mainly because it was short! I get much more pleasure out of reading fiction anyway. My post was referring to the post directly above mine.
The way he is so ready to excuse western imperialism as well-intended and completely trash the Muslim world, including, as people have said, getting close to Eurabia and Great Replacement chatter, shows that there’s some level of bigotry operating in his mind.
I’m all for criticism of Islam, but he seems to think Islam is the sole reason of why that part of the world is in the state it is, when we don’t have to go too far back to see a more modern version of the religion. The supposed good intentions of the west have a lot to answer for in encouraging the shift towards fundamentalism.
That and how comfortable he has been rubbing shoulders with the IDW makes my alarm bells go off. Having steak dinners and saying cheese to the cameras with Rogan, Peterson, Shapiro, cozying up to Murray… there’s plenty of signs.
I’m all for criticism of Islam, but he seems to think Islam is the sole reason of why that part of the world is in the state it is, when we don’t have to go too far back to see a more modern version of the religion. The supposed good intentions of the west have a lot to answer for in encouraging the shift towards fundamentalism.
That and how comfortable he has been rubbing shoulders with the IDW makes my alarm bells go off. Having steak dinners and saying cheese to the cameras with Rogan, Peterson, Shapiro, cozying up to Murray… there’s plenty of signs.
Really don't want to go down this road again, but I think the last line is pretty unfair. As an avid listener of his podcasts, he has completely fallen away from Rogan (largely because of his refusal to acknowledge science, particularly around health-related things), largely shows sympathy and a bit of horror at what has happened to Peterson and I've never heard him even mention Shapiro, aside from that debate. The Murray stuff is absolute BS and I maintain it's utterly ridiculous how it impacted Harris given what actually happened.
He was more than happy to rub shoulders with all of those guys for a while (maybe Shapiro just because he was part and parcel of that cadre).
Did he and Murray fall out or something? Maybe I haven’t been keeping up but a mere year ago he was saying things like "I love Douglas, Douglas is a friend, and he’s obviously brilliant and just a joy to listen to"
Like I said, maybe I’ve missed something, but it’s not as if Murray hadn’t been propagating a lot of shitty ideas by then. I fail to see where I’ve been unfair.
@Beachryan is likely confusing white supremacist Douglas Murray with white supremacist Charles Murray.
Sorry, I mean the whole palava with Charles Murray, I need to be clearer on my Murray's!
I've made this mistake at least once
Ah, fair enough. I’ve mixed the two as well. Though it doesn’t exactly speak well of Harris that he was defending Charles Murray when the bell curve nonsense started rearing its head again.
"Have you seen this amazing Canadian professor? He's really one of the greatest intellectuals of our time. He's politically balanced too. He's a best-selling author and also selling out big stadiums! You should check him out!"
-6 years later-
-6 years later-
See, now that's a tricky question eh. What do we really mean by 'why' and 'there'? Heck, we even have to establish what the reality of a 'camera' truly is, ya know. It's really not that simple, its fundamentally multidimensional in its complexity.
ah, the long-form answers
The host is a die hard Israel supporter that complains about cancel culture despite happily "cancelling" Palestinian supporters. In her mind, everyone who disagrees with her is an anti-semite and there's no convincing her otherwise.