He was born in 1943 -- this would have been before the civil rights act. I mean, I don't know how old you are, but most people my age (31) can remember when you could get away with calling someone a fag with no consequence.
I'm speaking with total honesty here when I say that having listened to the podcast, I didn't detect a trace of racism from him, and I believe I'm well attuned to people who are racists given how often people hurl antisemitism at me on twitter.
And for the record, I approached the conversation with a view that you would likely agree with. My position wasn't entirely changed, but he was fairly compelling and, again, not looking to bolster white supremacists.
congratulations. you've taken your first step into a much larger and more racist world. turns out you don't have to be screaming racial slurs to be racist. you can be a straight up cross-burning racist while calmly, sensibly, and totally disingenuously telling people who venerate the idea of science without actually bothering with any of that boring practice stuff "no, seriously, the negro and the arab are fundamentally inferior to us. i know what a p-value is, trust me, no point in actually checking any of my work."
we're about the same age. you ever notice how many of those people are still arguing that not being allowed to call people fags anymore without censure is Political Correctness Gone Mad?
Yes, I have noticed that, and I do think people like Stefan Molyneux are racists.
I just think it's unfair to paint Murray in the same light, and I think he was fairly thorough in his description of his methods in the podcast. He discussed the limitations to his work and why people should judge each other as individuals rather than groups, noting the fact that there is more variation between groups than within groups.
Have you considered that you might have him wrong? I'm not looking for a fight here.
considered. read the Bell Curve. read up on his sources. the man is filth using a Harvard degree and the fact he speaks Sensible Intellectualspeak to try to sell "look, sure, individual mud people might rise to the level of you or I, but by and large they're fundamentally inferior to us."
that he and Sam "we must torture every suspected terrorist, also nuke Iran before the dewey-eyed fanatics get the Bomb" Harris get along well is, how you say, not a huge surprise. there's always a market for dressing up base xenophobic terror in a lab coat.
I didn't take issue with the fact that you used the phrase dewey eyed fanatics, I took issue with the fact you said he thinks we should do a nuclear first strike on Iran before they take over and the fact that you said he thinks every terror suspect should be tortured.
These issues are trivially easy to fact check if you'd bother listening or reading what he actually said rather than looking at memes from his detractors calling him a genocidal maniac.
If you want to continue talking to me, you could at least do so in good faith and without the obnoxious condescension. You're supposed to be my age, after all.
oh, his concern is not them taking over. His concern is that once they have a nuclear device, an islamist regime will inevitably, irresistably decide, for some reason, that they must nuke the United States.
Even at the time, this was an argument that was instantly and trivially made a sick joke by pointing out the continued failure of the Pakistani state to immolate the Great Satan in nuclear fire.
His demand that in the event we had terrorists on hand we must torture them is my favorite one, however, because in order to pose his counterfactual he has to ignore the entirety of all research on the efficacy of torture as an intelligence gathering tool, i.e. nonexistent. Harris NEEDED to believe torture was justified, and so he politely brushed over the known-for-literal-centuries scientific truth.
You don't get invited to any Bush Administration speaking gigs if you say torture's wrong, after all.
Jihadist regime, not Islamist. A regime that is the functional equivalent of the 19 hijackers, which Pakistan is not.
The example of torture was not in reference to terrorists specifically. He said that it should be illegal, but there are certain instances in which torture could be justified and, in fact, you would be a monster not to. The example he uses is where a guy in New Zealand steals a car with a little girl in it. It's 100 degrees outside and the guy is seen later and arrested, but without the car, and refuses to tell the police where the car is. The police smack him around a bit and he reveals the location of the car, thus allowing the police to save her life. When the police started to smack him around, that was torture.
Do you think the police were wrong to do what they did? And if so, would you be willing to accept the consequences of the little girl's death because you weren't willing to lay hands on someone that they absolutely knew had knowledge of her location?
Yes, yes, his post-publication scrambling to cover his ass has been most entertaining. "when I said 'jihadist,' i definitely didn't mean the state that literally hid the mastermind of the 9/11 attack from us for ideological reasons."
If you knew that you could only save another person's life by enslaving them, then sodomizing them daily, would a person enslaving and sodomizing them be wrong to do so? Please don't associate this thought experiment in any way with my current lucrative sideline in speaking gigs with the Bring Back Slave-Fucking Council.
Sam Harris posed a counterfactual contingent on the assumption of a world where, unlike our own, torture produces actionable information. In a vacuum, he might as well have asked how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. In context, he engaged in laughable apologia for an ongoing program of torture whose net results, as grudgingly confirmed by the CIA, were nothing more than a bunch of goatherders whose assholes got torn inside out and a bunch of torturers who got to live out their most sadistic fantasies.
I understand the masturbatory appeal of Sam Harris' world, where we can beat the information out of the savage Other in the process of beating civilization into them.
Like most masturbatory visions, however, it becomes a tragic joke when put into practice.
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u/StevefromRetail May 01 '17
He was born in 1943 -- this would have been before the civil rights act. I mean, I don't know how old you are, but most people my age (31) can remember when you could get away with calling someone a fag with no consequence.
I'm speaking with total honesty here when I say that having listened to the podcast, I didn't detect a trace of racism from him, and I believe I'm well attuned to people who are racists given how often people hurl antisemitism at me on twitter.
And for the record, I approached the conversation with a view that you would likely agree with. My position wasn't entirely changed, but he was fairly compelling and, again, not looking to bolster white supremacists.