http://maxautonomy.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-sam-harris-fail.html
http://maxautonomy.blogspot.com/2016/11/goodbye-sam-harris-fail.html
As ridiculous as many of Trump's statements may have been, Harris repeatedly misrepresented what Trump said in order to make his criticisms of Trump seem more compelling than they actually were, never mind Harris's pretense that his denunciations entailed some kind of comparison between Trump and Hillary Clinton. Harris seems to have forgotten what he wrote previously about lying —
...
Tell enough lies, however, and the effort required to keep your audience in the dark quickly becomes unsustainable. While you might be spared a direct accusation of dishonesty, many people will conclude, for reasons that they might be unable to pinpoint, that they cannot trust you. You will begin to seem like someone who is always dancing around the facts—because you most certainly are. Many of us have known people like this. No one ever quite confronts them, but everyone begins to treat them like creatures of fiction. Such people are often quietly shunned, for reasons they probably never understand.
...
— Sam Harris, 'Lying (November 2013)'
The ridiculous melodramatic reaction from the young woman in the YouTube video below has as much substance as Sam Harris's denunciations of Trump — she just seems less reasonable because she is so emotional. But Sam Harris does not provide any more substance than she does — they both agree that a Trump presidency will lead to disaster, but fail to give any convincing reasons for this belief (and it should be trivially easy, given how obvious they seem to think it is). The most important difference in the denunciations that Harris provides of Trump, is that Harris does not become emotional and cry during the delivery of his insults —
No comments:
Post a Comment