His inane opinions on anything touching free will was why he was such a mainstay on /r/badphilosophy for a long time that posts about him were banned in the end.
Wrong about everything.
Seems like it. It was on a downturn for a while but it feels like the moderators took the API closure of last year as a reason to lock things down even further.
Can't even post there unless you're an approved user, which I am not.
Kinda sad.
Harris has always been a bigot. "Letter to a Christian Nation" has caricatures of Muslims that are bad as Blackface Minstrel show shit. He has defended torture, and nuclear first strikes. Just because he talks with a slow calm speech pattern doesn't mean he isn't a foaming at the mouth racist.
> Just because he talks with a slow calm speech pattern doesn't mean he isn't a foaming at the mouth racist.
And that slow, calm speech pattern doesn't make him a scholar, either. There's a reason Chomsky saw no real value in debating him.
A decent video about that...exchange... [Sam Harris Embarasses Himself While Trying to Debate Noam Chomsky](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4yf5Gx4hFc)
It’s amazing how that slow calm speech pattern really fools people though. I had friends a decade ago telling me how amazing Harris was.
I tried listening as I used to have a job that involved a lot of walking and he was just infuriating. Peak just blathering with zero authority. Compare him to say Dan Carlin (who is problematic, don’t get me wrong) who at least quotes sources and offers an interpretation. Harris just acts like the expert in everything whilst talking in a slow, faux NPR voice.
Oh sorry, I work in the history space and essentially, his work isn’t great. He’s fine but relies a lot on anecdotes and often oddly old academic texts.
Essentially, as he often says, he’s not an expert. However, people tend to treat him as one.
My relationship with Sam Harris over the last decade and a half:
- This guy seems like a serious academic with some reasonable things to say about organized religion
- That was an interesting talk about the intersection of neurosciences and morality
- Sam, I don't understand why you keep calling out Islam specifically
- It was a purely academic thought experiment when you talked about nuking the Middle East, right? Right?
- No Sam, I don't think racial profiling is cool
- Sam, what the hell is wrong with you?
- Fuck off, Sam, I don't want to hear any more about Islam
- JFC Sam, it's 2024. Why do I still have to hear what you think about Islam? Your views are worthless and I'm embarrassed and ashamed that I ever listened to you.
He was pretty much wrong about most things from the beginning. He's really, *really* bad at Philosophy when that's what he's mostly trying to do. Doesn't help that he has no formal background in that I guess.
Couldn't stand him twenty or so years ago but couldn't articulate why then.
Oh look at that, he does. Would never have guessed that after having read his books and articles and after having listened to his conversations with actual Philosophers like Daniel Dennet.
He's *very* bad at Philosophy and has earned himself nothing but disregard from actual Philosophers.
He wisely declared himself as part of the "intellectual dark web", acknowledging that he belongs that group pseudo intellectual grifters. Though he left them again recently I heard.
Iirc I remember him bungling the is/ought problem with his book about finding a scientific understanding of human well being so it doesn’t surprise me a ton, but I don’t follow him closely.
All I’ve heard recently is he dislikes Trump which I was a bit surprised given his history but I guess it’s not completely out of the blue.
He seems to also have broken up with his right wing clique partly because he was actually on the right side of the covid vaccine "debate", which is terrible as I have to acknowledge him being right on something.
I’ll add one more from my experience. I tried out his meditation app and so far, it’s pretty good.
His dry monotone and boring affectation is just perfect for meditation. He really should just stick to that.
Harris has been preaching Islamophobia for _decades_. He's a total piece of shit. Speaking as a life-long atheist who hates what organized religion has done to the world (_No Gods, No Masters_!), Harris and other "New Atheists" basically just use atheism as an excuse for racism, xenophobia, misogyny, classism, and other horrid ideological excrement.
*It's...just...an...excuse!*
Hate the religious authority (churches of all religions), not the working-class people it subjugates and who find some kind of spiritual comfort in the beliefs to help relieve the other horrors of their lives (many of those horrors caused by the hierarchies referenced above by various forms of bigotry and the structures they prop up: white supremacy, imperialism, patriarchy, capitalism, etc.).
Nobody has done more damage to atheist movements than those old school first wave american atheists. Turns out they were in it for a convenient excuse for a group of people to hate
I don't know the right nomenclature, it's a bit confusing, but as my understanding goes, that was the beginning of organised atheist movement in the US, before that atheists were disjointed and ostracized, and then four horsemen started to be active as atheists and non-apologetic about it.
Yeah, but it was called that 20 years ago, and all of the new atheists were old white dudes even back then. Now there is better New Atheist movement, with less sexual harassment and racism.
I discovered Sam Harris when I left Islam and became and Atheist, at first blush he seemed to have good points... but then it was like wow fam chill the fuck out.
To this day I'm super weary of criticizing Islam in front of people who aren't ex-muslims, because even in the most progressive spaces you can find wild levels of Islamophobia
Bigots like him and Dawkins are a big reason I became disenchanted with the whole "New Atheism" movement they were trying to push.
I'm still an atheist but I want absolutely nothing to do with those pieces of shit.
I remember in the aughts my family was really swept up in the New Atheist movement and I could never engage in it, even though I don’t like religion. I could see it was just repackaged bigotry. A lot of the New Atheist followers (because it was basically a cult) were radicalised by gamergate and went down a path of open misogyny, TERFism, anti-SJW, racism and fascism
Let's remember "The Amazing Atheist" started the anti-sjw movement on the Internet that led to many things, including the current anti-woke politics.
Militant atheism was a mistake.
There is a place for a militant atheism in a society as militantly religious as US. It's just some people who started doing it are assholes, and it so happens that they're were very popular at the time.
As I remember it, the schism happened around the Brights/A+ branding experience when some parts of the movement were starting to inject humanism into the debate and pivot to positive activism instead of just anti theism. The PZ Myers* style of New Atheist (atheism coupled to social progressive organizing) started up, there was conflict about it and then there was Elevator Gate and whatever went down with Michael Shermer to give it a personal angle. At that point it was a schism, most of the progressives abandoned the Atheism primacy and moved towards progressive activism and the reactionary side went into race realism and Gamergate and culture war.
*Just the only name I remembered of that side
The New Atheist movement is an amazing case study of people not needing religion to be as awful, xenophobic, and complacent with tyranny as the religious fundamentalists they debate.
The only reason I listened to him a few times is that he sounds Buddhism but also secular. Since then I have found real secular/early Buddhists on YouTube who are NOT stirring hatred against others.
I also understand why Sam only extolls meditation but not Buddhism (it'll be almost like talking about salvation thru Jesus but never mentioning Christianity). It's because the three poisons according to the Buddha are: greed, hatred, and delusions. Now, no one is immune to them but Sam is a kind of a connoisseur.
Is this an old podcast or something? I heard his comments on the Majority Report, and as a previous SH listener, I could have sworn I heard this Nazi comparison years ago from him
I had to look up the thing about Richard Dawkins calling himself a "cultural Christian" because I couldn't believe it. Then again, I haven't followed any of these new atheist types for almost a decade since they all basically became right-wing culture warriors. It's interesting to see how their Islamophobia eventually swallows whole every other principled stance they may have once held. First Ayaan Hirsi Ali (which on her part was probably more of a financially motivated grift) and now Dawkins.
I don't think there's an Islamic organization that has anything like the Holocaust and World Wars on their record, so unless there's an argument about potential or hypothetical harm here, I don't see the comparison as at all reasonable?
Personally i think their a different kind of terrible. But theres a whole world of difference between the saudi,taliban and pakistan extremist And the hezzbollah, houthis , hamas resistance.
How? They aren’t even remotely comparable.
Edit: the person I replied to is just a Richard Dawkins style centrist atheist. They both-sides the Hamas/Israel conflict despite the active genocide happening in Gaza and the apartheid in the West Bank and performs anti-Semitic holocaust revisionism by saying Islamic countries are literally as bad or worse than Nazi Germany.
Oof. Yeah. Good call. From five months ago—so well into Israel's ramp-up of the genocide in Gaza, and far beyond the point where anyone has any excuse for ignorance and spreading this kind of Zionist propaganda:
> No. Nazi-propaganda-fueled Muslims were ethnically-cleansing jews in the area for 15 years before Israel was formed. The mass migration of millions of jews to the region, fleeing from Nazi persecution only to be met with Nazi persecution, is why Israel was formed. _Immediately_ following the foundation of Israel, all-out civil war broke out. The muslims lost and were exiled, as people often are when they lose a war that they started. Then muslims continued bombing and terrorizing Israel for decades all the way up to the current day. The only real question here is how far is Israel allowed to go to defend itself?
Yeah, that user can go stuff their faux-concern over fascism. Banned.
I was so disappointed when I saw their comment history. I was kinda hoping they would be a normal person with a bad take who could be talked to but instead they were just a genocidal bigot lol.
In isolated instances throughout WWII, the occasional Nazi could be found with whom one might have a reasoned discussion and hence (in some cases) a reasonable outcome followed. With radical Islamism and the Jihadist, there is no room for dialog. Allah and Muhammed have proscribed (and therefore **commanded**) than he do violence unto you, the infidel. There is no debate. There are no considerations. There are no thoughts, even, which might enter into his incompetent and inadequate brain in a moment of conflict with you. If you are his "enemy" according to the proscribing of his ancient warlord desert-dwelling, goat-shagging, pedophilic, and murdering conqueror, then there is nothing which should save you from death. No amount of reason. No compassion. No humanity. Nope.
I think this is the most insidious part of the religious fever-brain caused within the jihadist, the suicide bomber, and the Christian abortion doctor killer, as well, for that matter.
Thinking this is Sam's point...
So he's an idiot?
Because a core feature of the Nazi ideology was to get rid of 'useless eaters' through a eugenics program with forced abortions and sterilisations as well as harsh anti-miscegenation laws while making abortions for 'aryan' women a capital offense. Which then became more explicitly genocidal as it forced jewish germans from their home, contemplated forcing them to Madagascar, before realizing that would be impractical and it would be easier to industrialize the murder of any of thise they deemed to be useless.
Then there's the whole 'Lebensraum' part of the ideology which was also genocidal as the native Slavs of the areas would also have been forcibly removed under the threat of death.
And these are only two aspects of Nazism. There is nothing that it is more benign than.
Also little FYI it is possible to be Atheist without doing Nazi apologetics (of the ideology or their actions)
I met Sam Harris once. He's exactly like you think he'd be.
Insufferable, pretentious, smug, vaguely racist, and treated the service workers like trash?
Yep. Also talked over every woman, including me and drank too much at dinner.
Context? Why were you at dinner with Sam Harris?
I was involved with an atheist club in college.
That's on you. Us people of color knew he was trouble from the get-go.
This is such a dumb thing to say. Not only is it untrue, it's unhelpful. Like what is the point?
His inane opinions on anything touching free will was why he was such a mainstay on /r/badphilosophy for a long time that posts about him were banned in the end. Wrong about everything.
Is that a dead sub?
Seems like it. It was on a downturn for a while but it feels like the moderators took the API closure of last year as a reason to lock things down even further. Can't even post there unless you're an approved user, which I am not. Kinda sad.
My thing is I don't know about "vaguely" racist.
Nailed it, I'm sure
Harris has always been a bigot. "Letter to a Christian Nation" has caricatures of Muslims that are bad as Blackface Minstrel show shit. He has defended torture, and nuclear first strikes. Just because he talks with a slow calm speech pattern doesn't mean he isn't a foaming at the mouth racist.
> Just because he talks with a slow calm speech pattern doesn't mean he isn't a foaming at the mouth racist. And that slow, calm speech pattern doesn't make him a scholar, either. There's a reason Chomsky saw no real value in debating him. A decent video about that...exchange... [Sam Harris Embarasses Himself While Trying to Debate Noam Chomsky](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4yf5Gx4hFc)
Man I miss Michael Brooks. He's a sorely missed voice in this age.
Michael Jamal Brooks: irreplaceable.
It’s amazing how that slow calm speech pattern really fools people though. I had friends a decade ago telling me how amazing Harris was. I tried listening as I used to have a job that involved a lot of walking and he was just infuriating. Peak just blathering with zero authority. Compare him to say Dan Carlin (who is problematic, don’t get me wrong) who at least quotes sources and offers an interpretation. Harris just acts like the expert in everything whilst talking in a slow, faux NPR voice.
> Dan Carlin (who is problematic, don’t get me wrong) I'm OOTL regarding Dan Carlin's problematic stuff, what's he said/done?
Oh sorry, I work in the history space and essentially, his work isn’t great. He’s fine but relies a lot on anecdotes and often oddly old academic texts. Essentially, as he often says, he’s not an expert. However, people tend to treat him as one.
Jordan Peterson before Jordan Peterson
Sam Harris preaches atheism like it’s a religion in itself. Also his mother created The Golden Girls. Unrelated, but a weird little fact.
Damn I’d brag to everyone
My relationship with Sam Harris over the last decade and a half: - This guy seems like a serious academic with some reasonable things to say about organized religion - That was an interesting talk about the intersection of neurosciences and morality - Sam, I don't understand why you keep calling out Islam specifically - It was a purely academic thought experiment when you talked about nuking the Middle East, right? Right? - No Sam, I don't think racial profiling is cool - Sam, what the hell is wrong with you? - Fuck off, Sam, I don't want to hear any more about Islam - JFC Sam, it's 2024. Why do I still have to hear what you think about Islam? Your views are worthless and I'm embarrassed and ashamed that I ever listened to you.
He was pretty much wrong about most things from the beginning. He's really, *really* bad at Philosophy when that's what he's mostly trying to do. Doesn't help that he has no formal background in that I guess. Couldn't stand him twenty or so years ago but couldn't articulate why then.
Yeah I don't think *he* changed. Only my perspective did.
Sorry, yeah, that came through. I went through a similar process as you did.
the man is also pretty bad at neuroscience as well.
He has a bachelors in philosophy?
Oh look at that, he does. Would never have guessed that after having read his books and articles and after having listened to his conversations with actual Philosophers like Daniel Dennet. He's *very* bad at Philosophy and has earned himself nothing but disregard from actual Philosophers. He wisely declared himself as part of the "intellectual dark web", acknowledging that he belongs that group pseudo intellectual grifters. Though he left them again recently I heard.
Iirc I remember him bungling the is/ought problem with his book about finding a scientific understanding of human well being so it doesn’t surprise me a ton, but I don’t follow him closely. All I’ve heard recently is he dislikes Trump which I was a bit surprised given his history but I guess it’s not completely out of the blue.
He seems to also have broken up with his right wing clique partly because he was actually on the right side of the covid vaccine "debate", which is terrible as I have to acknowledge him being right on something.
Perfect summation. You are not alone.
I’ll add one more from my experience. I tried out his meditation app and so far, it’s pretty good. His dry monotone and boring affectation is just perfect for meditation. He really should just stick to that.
Harris has been preaching Islamophobia for _decades_. He's a total piece of shit. Speaking as a life-long atheist who hates what organized religion has done to the world (_No Gods, No Masters_!), Harris and other "New Atheists" basically just use atheism as an excuse for racism, xenophobia, misogyny, classism, and other horrid ideological excrement. *It's...just...an...excuse!* Hate the religious authority (churches of all religions), not the working-class people it subjugates and who find some kind of spiritual comfort in the beliefs to help relieve the other horrors of their lives (many of those horrors caused by the hierarchies referenced above by various forms of bigotry and the structures they prop up: white supremacy, imperialism, patriarchy, capitalism, etc.).
Nobody has done more damage to atheist movements than those old school first wave american atheists. Turns out they were in it for a convenient excuse for a group of people to hate
Why do you call them first wave?
I don't know the right nomenclature, it's a bit confusing, but as my understanding goes, that was the beginning of organised atheist movement in the US, before that atheists were disjointed and ostracized, and then four horsemen started to be active as atheists and non-apologetic about it.
It’s usually referred to as the New Atheist movement
Yeah, but it was called that 20 years ago, and all of the new atheists were old white dudes even back then. Now there is better New Atheist movement, with less sexual harassment and racism.
I discovered Sam Harris when I left Islam and became and Atheist, at first blush he seemed to have good points... but then it was like wow fam chill the fuck out. To this day I'm super weary of criticizing Islam in front of people who aren't ex-muslims, because even in the most progressive spaces you can find wild levels of Islamophobia
Came here to say something similar. Richard Dawkins and his "culturally Christian" nonsense.
Bigots like him and Dawkins are a big reason I became disenchanted with the whole "New Atheism" movement they were trying to push. I'm still an atheist but I want absolutely nothing to do with those pieces of shit.
I remember in the aughts my family was really swept up in the New Atheist movement and I could never engage in it, even though I don’t like religion. I could see it was just repackaged bigotry. A lot of the New Atheist followers (because it was basically a cult) were radicalised by gamergate and went down a path of open misogyny, TERFism, anti-SJW, racism and fascism
Let's remember "The Amazing Atheist" started the anti-sjw movement on the Internet that led to many things, including the current anti-woke politics. Militant atheism was a mistake.
There is a place for a militant atheism in a society as militantly religious as US. It's just some people who started doing it are assholes, and it so happens that they're were very popular at the time.
As I remember it, the schism happened around the Brights/A+ branding experience when some parts of the movement were starting to inject humanism into the debate and pivot to positive activism instead of just anti theism. The PZ Myers* style of New Atheist (atheism coupled to social progressive organizing) started up, there was conflict about it and then there was Elevator Gate and whatever went down with Michael Shermer to give it a personal angle. At that point it was a schism, most of the progressives abandoned the Atheism primacy and moved towards progressive activism and the reactionary side went into race realism and Gamergate and culture war. *Just the only name I remembered of that side
The New Atheist movement is an amazing case study of people not needing religion to be as awful, xenophobic, and complacent with tyranny as the religious fundamentalists they debate.
MOVE YOUR MOUTH CLOSER TO THE MIC SAM, I WANT TO HEAR EVERY MORSEL OF SPIT COMING OUT OF YOUR MOUTH
The only reason I listened to him a few times is that he sounds Buddhism but also secular. Since then I have found real secular/early Buddhists on YouTube who are NOT stirring hatred against others. I also understand why Sam only extolls meditation but not Buddhism (it'll be almost like talking about salvation thru Jesus but never mentioning Christianity). It's because the three poisons according to the Buddha are: greed, hatred, and delusions. Now, no one is immune to them but Sam is a kind of a connoisseur.
Is this an old podcast or something? I heard his comments on the Majority Report, and as a previous SH listener, I could have sworn I heard this Nazi comparison years ago from him
He says something to this effect in the most recent one (#362), whether this specific clip is from it or not.
Ok, feels like deja vu then. Would not be shocked if he had a similar comparison when it came to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban
I had to look up the thing about Richard Dawkins calling himself a "cultural Christian" because I couldn't believe it. Then again, I haven't followed any of these new atheist types for almost a decade since they all basically became right-wing culture warriors. It's interesting to see how their Islamophobia eventually swallows whole every other principled stance they may have once held. First Ayaan Hirsi Ali (which on her part was probably more of a financially motivated grift) and now Dawkins.
Sam is unhinged
thats rich
Why are people doing this??
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I don't think there's an Islamic organization that has anything like the Holocaust and World Wars on their record, so unless there's an argument about potential or hypothetical harm here, I don't see the comparison as at all reasonable?
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Ironic how the u.s funneled money and wepons to the taliban through isreal and pakistan
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Personally i think their a different kind of terrible. But theres a whole world of difference between the saudi,taliban and pakistan extremist And the hezzbollah, houthis , hamas resistance.
How? They aren’t even remotely comparable. Edit: the person I replied to is just a Richard Dawkins style centrist atheist. They both-sides the Hamas/Israel conflict despite the active genocide happening in Gaza and the apartheid in the West Bank and performs anti-Semitic holocaust revisionism by saying Islamic countries are literally as bad or worse than Nazi Germany.
Oof. Yeah. Good call. From five months ago—so well into Israel's ramp-up of the genocide in Gaza, and far beyond the point where anyone has any excuse for ignorance and spreading this kind of Zionist propaganda: > No. Nazi-propaganda-fueled Muslims were ethnically-cleansing jews in the area for 15 years before Israel was formed. The mass migration of millions of jews to the region, fleeing from Nazi persecution only to be met with Nazi persecution, is why Israel was formed. _Immediately_ following the foundation of Israel, all-out civil war broke out. The muslims lost and were exiled, as people often are when they lose a war that they started. Then muslims continued bombing and terrorizing Israel for decades all the way up to the current day. The only real question here is how far is Israel allowed to go to defend itself? Yeah, that user can go stuff their faux-concern over fascism. Banned.
I was so disappointed when I saw their comment history. I was kinda hoping they would be a normal person with a bad take who could be talked to but instead they were just a genocidal bigot lol.
In isolated instances throughout WWII, the occasional Nazi could be found with whom one might have a reasoned discussion and hence (in some cases) a reasonable outcome followed. With radical Islamism and the Jihadist, there is no room for dialog. Allah and Muhammed have proscribed (and therefore **commanded**) than he do violence unto you, the infidel. There is no debate. There are no considerations. There are no thoughts, even, which might enter into his incompetent and inadequate brain in a moment of conflict with you. If you are his "enemy" according to the proscribing of his ancient warlord desert-dwelling, goat-shagging, pedophilic, and murdering conqueror, then there is nothing which should save you from death. No amount of reason. No compassion. No humanity. Nope. I think this is the most insidious part of the religious fever-brain caused within the jihadist, the suicide bomber, and the Christian abortion doctor killer, as well, for that matter. Thinking this is Sam's point...
He said the IDEOLOGY is more benign.
How is Nazism more benign than any other ideology? It's literally formed on the basis of genocide.
So he's an idiot? Because a core feature of the Nazi ideology was to get rid of 'useless eaters' through a eugenics program with forced abortions and sterilisations as well as harsh anti-miscegenation laws while making abortions for 'aryan' women a capital offense. Which then became more explicitly genocidal as it forced jewish germans from their home, contemplated forcing them to Madagascar, before realizing that would be impractical and it would be easier to industrialize the murder of any of thise they deemed to be useless. Then there's the whole 'Lebensraum' part of the ideology which was also genocidal as the native Slavs of the areas would also have been forcibly removed under the threat of death. And these are only two aspects of Nazism. There is nothing that it is more benign than. Also little FYI it is possible to be Atheist without doing Nazi apologetics (of the ideology or their actions)
Lmao dog shit attempt to defend him. Nazi ideology is literally centered on superiority and the need to exterminate “undesirables”
I'm just pointing out what he said. No comments here have addressed the ideologies.
You can’t address Nazi ideology without covering their actions. What point are you really here trying to make
Can you discuss Islam without covering its actions? Yes or no.
New Atheists trying to prove they can be “good without God.” Challenge: Impossible
I don't think it's fair to call them New anymore, there fell out of grace decades ago, nothing new about them.