What is his "leftism"? Mindfulness?

jimmy spako wrote: Thu Apr 11, 2024 12:13 pm What is his "leftism"? Mindfulness?

That’s the weird part… no.

His economic political positions are high taxes on the rich, reducing government expenditure corporate welfare, pro science environmental policy etc.

Behind the Waking Up paywall it’s a lot of very liberal - in the US sense - guests and conversations, including apologies for previously associating with dickheads like Peterson.

I think a previous post was correct though. If he’s changing positions and apologising for past mistakes behind a paywall he should have the courage of his convictions and do this publicly so his far more centrist/rightwing fans of the Making Sense podcast know his actual positions. Otherwise it does look like grifting.

Unfortunately he’s totally awful on the Israel Palestine conflict regardless. Which is pretty unforgivable

Gramsci wrote: Mon Apr 15, 2024 7:36 amUnfortunately he’s totally awful on the Israel Palestine conflict regardless.

His latest comments are pretty in line with what he has said before, but it's astonishing how he keeps reaching for the bottom.

I liked Sam Harris more than the others back in the day because his investigations of Buddhist meditation suggested a higher degree of openness as well as a greater consistency in the stated commitments to scientific and presuppositionless inquiry, whereas generally there remained a superstitious attitude toward anything happening to fall under the category of "religion" or the "spritual", treating them as untouchable and unmentionable. One could see at this point, if it wasn't clear otherwise, how extremely narrow and incurious much of the atheist and skeptic world was when, in finding out about his interest in meditation, many of his fans went "man, why are you into this woo shit?".

Of course it's even more creepy that he could talk about this deep compassion and so on while making arguments in favour of torture, or pre-emptive nuclear strikes, or that some people's beliefs are so dangerous that it might be ethically permissible to kill them. And then the weasely fuck tried to claim that he never actually said what he said.

Crap wf 4.

I think the key is to understanding Harris is just how antithetical Islam is to his world view. If you believe the things he believes about the nature of reality then Islam in particular looks like a colossal cancer on human existence.

He unfortunately forgets the number one victim of Islam is Muslims. The same could be said about other religions but in its current unreconstructed state Islam is uniquely awful.

That said, it’s no excuse for discrimination against individual practitioners especially when that constitutes collective punishment.

Gramsci wrote: Mon Apr 15, 2024 10:48 am I think the key is to understanding Harris is just how antithetical Islam is to his world view. If you believe the things he believes about the nature of reality then Islam in particular looks like a colossal cancer on human existence.

That makes sense. He places a very strong importance on beliefs, thinks that beliefs are a primary motivation for behaviour, and that beliefs can be definitively established as true or false. He is also a moral realist, so true beliefs = good actions. Islam strikes me as blatantly and self-consciously relativist - this is what we do, if you're with us you do this, if not whatever as long as you're not threatening members of the community ("threatening" can sometimes have non-obvious and ominous definitions, such as maintaining an environment at odds with Islamic values).

Although arguably the same holds in practice for all reigning political philosophy when you get down to it, insofar as statehood, citizenship and inter-state relations are concerned. And see how we kind of slid between one and the other in the same way that Harris does - from the behaviour of individuals to the behaviour of states, which obviously have way different explanatory mechanisms.

Personally I'm much more skeptical of being able to draw causal lines like these, that beliefs are even coherent in this way, or how you would determine which belief is most prominent and therefore determining of behaviour (since any individual has a host of contradictory ones), that what is expressed by an individual is equivalent to what goes on inside their head (probably the least likely, I think even Harris would have to agree), or that good is guaranteed to follow from true. Certainly on the last point Harris' own actions would count against it - assuming his ideas about beliefs are true, and that he himself holds true beliefs, bad actions (as I judge them) can clearly follow from true beliefs.

This also before we get into how individual members of the faith handle moral questions. And here Harris cheats again. Clearly there are devout Muslims whose moral beliefs and actions he would find relatively unobjectionable. But this, he would say, is not the true faith. Here discussions normally get caught in what actually is the true faith and so on, but for Harris it should be enough to note what beliefs the individual actually holds, regardless of how this corresponds to the true doctrine. But now individual beliefs are not held to be determining.

This is getting messy, and his thinking on these things appears to be quite messy. I haven't read The Moral Landscape but I've seen it picked apart plenty.

kokorodoko wrote: Mon Apr 15, 2024 12:13 pm He is also a moral realist, so true beliefs = good actions.
...
Certainly on the last point Harris' own actions would count against it - assuming his ideas about beliefs are true, and that he himself holds true beliefs, bad actions (as I judge them) can clearly follow from true beliefs.

and LMAO, I got confused with this shit too. The importance of true beliefs for him should hold specifically with regards to moral facts. False beliefs about moral facts = bad actions. But what he argues - this is his main point against religion - is that this holds for any facts of any kind. So for example a belief that the Earth is 6000 years old - a false belief - is taken to be predictive of morally bad actions somewhere down the line.

Horseshit Theory

Some absolute hilarity going on on Harris’ Making Sense insta after he started a substack, with a first article a very long tirade on how awful Trump is and that wants him in jail.

Comment after comment from Christians, Yoga weirdos and Trump morons basically say, “but you don’t like Muslims, I thought you were one of us!!!?”

It’s an absolute dumpster fire.

A transphobic, Islamophobic right-wing clod.

Absolute CRAP.

Gramsci wrote: Sat Jun 01, 2024 5:49 am Some absolute hilarity going on on Harris’ Making Sense insta after he started a substack, with a first article a very long tirade on how awful Trump is and that wants him in jail.

Comment after comment from Christians, Yoga weirdos and Trump morons basically say, “but you don’t like Muslims, I thought you were one of us!!!?”

It’s an absolute dumpster fire.

I guess it benefits to have splitters out there trojan horsing the occasional reasonable argument into the dickosphere, but I guess it cuts both ways.