Harris's habit of referring to Noam Chomsky simply as "Noam" is quite irritating to me.
I was about to write "Christ, what an asshole," but on further reflection I think "Christ, what a dipshit" is a little more apropos.
I mean, the answer is self-promotion, obviously. The fact that we've all heard of noted non-thinker non-interesting-person "Sam Harris" at all is pretty baffling and a testament to some decent self-promotion skills.
I hadn't heard of him before this and now I feel like I want a brain rinse or something.
I still haven't heard of him, really, so I think I'll skip clicking on the link.
I refuse to do more than quickly skim the beginning of that, but my strong impression is that the whole thing will read like someone who actually knows a lot about something and is clever being drawn into an annoying argument with an stupid person who doesn't know what they're talking about but is, seriously, really sure that he does. If someone actually finds the effort to read the whole thing, though, I'd be curious if that's actually true.
I mean, I'm not sure that that's what it would be. Probably more than half of my reaction is that I've seen him try this sort of thing with philosophers (who for the most part, and very rightly, just told him to piss off), and he was basically one of those really overconfident-and-moderately-but-not-really-impressively-bright sophomores who need to be told "no that doesn't work but explaining in detail why is called "this course and the next one too" so just put that aside for now", except that now he has managed to graduate and no one can do that to him anymore.
This is the lamest form of threadjacking, and early, but since Sam Harris sucks it but I can't believe that the blog didn't take up my invite to talk about the Columbia art project mattress-guy accused of rape lawsuit against Columbia. Does McMegan have stupid, ill-informed things to say? Why yes!
I'll put up a thread. It would be wrong to nitpick that McM doesn't know what the word 'brief' means, I suppose.
And now I clicked on the link, goddammit, and see that this SH is a troll. Does anyone actually pay attention to him? Good God why?
Sam Harris is a notorious Islamophobic bigot. Also an advocate for torture.
11 - Although for someone with a PhD in neuroscience he really seems to spend most of his time doing things at best questionably related to it. The real conclusion, though, is that UCLA must be a fake school and the entire CA system of higher education dismantled and the parts sold off to the highest corporate entity selected to bid on it.
I'm trying out a new thing where I just say that something that is probably going to happen must happen and then feel gratified when, say, the CA legislature does what I said they had to do. Power!
8 If someone actually finds the effort to read the whole thing, though, I'd be curious if that's actually true.
I could only get through the first few entries. If someone actually finds the effort to read the whole thing, the rest of us should try to be more entertaining or interesting so they have better things to do next time.
8, 16 -- I read most of Chomsky's entries, and just the frist sentence or two from the troll's. Chomsky totally eats his lunch, which is the sole justification to the carbon footprint of the pixels involved.
From my skim NC seemed to be very patient, I actually thought it could be a useful example for parents of super annoying small children.
Anarchists are always patient...for nightfall.
Sorry, that was me. Chrome is being weird.
this reminds me of that time that I followed Hulk Hogan for three days yelling out "if you think you're so tough, why don't you wrestle me"
Sam Harris is interesting because he's so twentieth century: it's no longer enough to be, like, kill all the brown people. He's all, kill all the brown people because science! and rationality!
And this infantile retreat to the past was obviously what a lot of Americans wanted in the big crazy years after 9/11. He's Mary Baker Eddy for our times.
He's Mary Baker Eddy for our times.
I won't say that to Tim's distant cousins who are Christian Scientists. I think that they are super excited to come, because Boston is the home of that church. They call it the Mother Church which sounds like something out of Star Trek.
He's all, kill all the brown people because science! and rationality!
That is the best characterization of Sam Harris that I have ever read. Please repeat it far and wide.
Is it my imagination or has SH gotten a Daniel Patrick Moynihan-esque amount of friendly coverage in the Atlantic over the past few years? I recall, in particular, a rather long profile/interview a year or two ago that was a thorough bro-ing down, in which SH was prompted to discuss his badass Brazilian jiujitsu training, his concealed handgun, his surveillance-and-threat-detection procedures and, of course, the scientific method as it had led him to adopt same.
Publishing this exchanges cements Sam Harris's status as the world's greatest expert on what an asshole Sam Harris is. Obviously.
OT: Aside from a tremendously favourable overall impression, the main thing that strikes me about Seattle is the tremendous amount of extremely low-key security. I'm not entirely sure what sorts of threats are horrible enough that you need to employ hundreds of people to prevent them but mild enough to be stopped by a 60 year-old person with a walkie talkie, but there sure must be a great deal of it.
Yes. San Francisco seemed great but now I realize it is for shit, comparably.
I was thinking it was unusually polite homeless people, which may be the same thing.
27: Although San Francisco certainly ain't shit, BLS says it has 10.6 security guards per 1,000 employees, versus 6.8 in Seattle (metro divisions). Maybe they try to be less obtrusive here.
As delicious as it is to see Sam Harris get slapped around by the kind of actual intellectual he only imagines himself to be, it's even more delicious that he's too oblivious to realize that this is what the exchange shows. Fuck that guy.
|| Don't want to jinx it but it appears that selling my car is going to be a whole lot easier than either giving away my Arabic language research library or figuring out how the hell to ship my effects overseas is proving to be.
|>
I just heated up a hot pocket for a hobo. Offered me a dollar, too, and may gave been casing the garage.
All those lightly-armed police are supposed to be able to handle public unrest at a moderate level without resorting to SWAT militarism too soon. Reaction (still) to the WTO debacle.
I was thinking of people who weren't police or even uniformed security. Just doormen/women.
I picture the "i" in "clewi" being dotted with a little heart.
I'm hoping for a sketch of a sleeping cat, myself.
I read almost the entire thing, partly for the "train-wreck" aspect of SH's replies, and partly because, while I admire NC's intelligence, the guy is a complete douche: arrogant, passive-aggressive, and very much filled with himself. And I found myself hoping for at least one good counter-punch by SH just because. NC's assumptions around the bombing of the pharmaceutical lab as stated are just assumptions, and he even says this, in an "oh this is too obvious to need any actual evidence" way, and I was kind of hoping the Sh would notice this and point it out, just to see what would happen. But SH's narcissism kept him blind and the whole thing ended up a waste of time. Oh well, I've spent longer reading less interesting things.
while I admire NC's intelligence, the guy is a complete douche: arrogant, passive-aggressive, and very much filled with himself
Yeah, this is very true. He's the same way with linguistics as well as politics.
Eh, Chomsky. I mean, his contributions to anarchist theory and historiography are okay, but minimal. He was never much of a street-level activist, and he is pretty remote from a lot of current issues in the milieu. Which, as I've said before, leaves his record as a critic of US foreign policy, at which he excels, and for which he is widely criticized by many anarchist ideologues. I'm not saying he's never made a mistake there, and occasionally it does seem like he's missing the forest for the trees, but his over all record on that score is pretty solid.
I've always wanted to be a Chomsky fan but have been held back by the fact that he's frequently full of shit. So I found his evisceration of Harris gratifying, and I read it to the end.