Tuesday, December 20, 2016

We Love A Conspiracy

Everyone is now aware of the claims that the Russians (i.e. the Kremlin under Valdimar Putin) supposedly attempted to influence the 2016 U.S. Presidential election in favor of Donald Trump.

'The Washington Post' reported on this back in June of 2016, in this story entitled 'Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on Trump' —
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/russian-government-hackers-penetrated-dnc-stole-..._story.html

And here is a later story from 'The Washington Post', dated December 9, 2016, entitled 'Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House' —
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama-orders-review-of-russian-hacking-..._story.html

But notice this paragraph from the later story, explicitly acknowledging that a connection could not be made to the Russian government — in direct contradiction to the titles of both 'Washington Post' stories —

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama-orders-review-of-russian-hacking-..._story.html

...
The CIA presentation to senators about Russia’s intentions fell short of a formal U.S. assessment produced by all 17 intelligence agencies. A senior U.S. official said there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered.

For example, intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin “directing” the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, a second senior U.S. official said. Those actors, according to the official, were “one step” removed from the Russian government, rather than government employees. Moscow has in the past used middlemen to participate in sensitive intelligence operations so it has plausible deniability.
...

So it needs to be repeated — 'The Washington Post' openly acknowledges that they have nothing to prove their basic claim that the Russian government attempted to manipulate the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, but they make that assertion anyway — it is a conspiracy theory, and the 'Washington Post' just expects its readers to believe it.

Here is an article by Glenn Greenwald, dated December 10, 2016, entitled 'Anonymous Leaks to the WashPost About the CIA’s Russia Beliefs Are No Substitute for Evidence', where he attacks 'The Washington Post' article quoted above —

https://theintercept.com/2016/12/10/...leaks-to-the-washpost-about-the-cias-russia-beliefs-are-no-substitute-for-evidence/

THE WASHINGTON POST late Friday night published an explosive story that, in many ways, is classic American journalism of the worst sort: The key claims are based exclusively on the unverified assertions of anonymous officials, who in turn are disseminating their own claims about what the CIA purportedly believes, all based on evidence that remains completely secret.
...
Needless to say, Democrats — still eager to make sense of their election loss and to find causes for it other than themselves — immediately declared these anonymous claims about what the CIA believes to be true, and, with a somewhat sweet, religious-type faith, treated these anonymous assertions as proof of what they wanted to believe all along: that Vladimir Putin was rooting for Donald Trump to win and Hillary Clinton to lose and used nefarious means to ensure that outcome. That Democrats are now venerating unverified, anonymous CIA leaks as sacred is par for the course for them this year, but it’s also a good indication of how confused and lost U.S. political culture has become in the wake of Trump’s victory. ...

And here is an article at 'Esquire', dated October 20, 2016, entitled 'How Russia Pulled Off the Biggest Election Hack in U.S. History'. Notice that not a single thing in this article is documented, including a claim that the Russians "even hacked satellites to cover their tracks" —
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a49791/russian-dnc-emails-hacked/

Other than as an exercise in testing your credulity, that article is not worth reading, but here are just a couple of quotes to demonstrate that point —

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a49791/russian-dnc-emails-hacked/
https://archive.is/SemNi

...
The most effective outlet by far, however, was WikiLeaks. Russian intelligence likely began feeding hacked documents to Julian Assange's "whistleblower" site in June 2015, after breaching Saudi Arabia's foreign ministry. A group called WikiSaudiLeaks, probably a Guccifer-like front for Fancy Bear, claimed that "WikiLeaks have been given access to some part of these documents." The so-called Saudi Cables showed princes buying influence and monitoring dissidents. They became a major news story, proving that the old methods worked even better in the twenty-first century.
...

Notice the uses of the words 'likely' and 'probably' in the quote above. Should we thank the author for his honesty in at least not pretending that he had real knowledge that what he wrote is true? It would have been more honest, if he had begun that paragraph with: "I'm going to make some stuff up here, because I want to ..."

And for one more example, consider this quote from the same 'Esquire' article —

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a49791/russian-dnc-emails-hacked/
https://archive.is/SemNi

...
Using cloud services such as OneDrive was a clever but risky move—it was a little like taking the bus to make off with stolen goods from a burglary. Though the widespread use of the services by legitimate users offered a degree of cover for the hackers, data provided by Microsoft also helped America's elite digital spies identify the DNC intruders "with confidence" as Russian. It is even possible that the U. S. government has been able to identify the names and personal details of individual operators. The Russians knew they'd been caught. On July 30, an FSB press release announced that twenty government and defense organizations had been hit by high-powered spying tools.
...

I assume the link below is the FSB (i.e. the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation) press release the author is talking about, but how on earth does it prove "the Russians knew they'd been caught", as the author wrote in the quote above? It took some digging to find the memo, since the author did not provide a link to it, and it is in Russian, so the author had to translate it to make use of it at all (maybe the author reads Russian, and just neglected to point that out) —
https://archive.is/sNSWu
http://www.fsb.ru/fsb/press/message/single.htm%21id%3D10437870%40fsbMessage.html
https://www.scmagazineuk.com/fsb-spotted-malware-on-20-government-org-networks/article/529964/

Here is the Google translation — for what it is worth — I cannot attest to its accuracy, since I do not read Russian. In any case, the only thing this translation of the press release indicates is what it contains — that the Russians believe they were targeted by professionals, and that the attack was similar to operations 'previously identified'. Anything else is conjecture —

FSB press release from July 30, 2016, regarding cyber espionage.

Here is a tweet from the author of the article at 'Esquire' quoted above, in response to skeptics who think that those making this accusation of a supposed 'Russian Connection' should provide proof, as opposed to their speculations —

https://twitter.com/RidT/status/810114356797210624
http://archive.vn/Sszch

Thomas Rid tweet from December 17, 2016.

Notice the tweet that the author is responding to demands that critical readers prove a negative. This is a common fallacy where one attempts to shift the burden of proof in order to avoid their own responsibility for providing evidence and proof when making an accusation. The individual making the assertion has the burden of proof, since, strictly speaking, it is impossible to prove a claim cannot be true.

How would you prove that no reindeer can fly, for example? Dropping as many reindeer as you could catch out of an airplane only proves that those you dropped could not fly — it does not prove that no reindeer can fly. In short, there is no end to the claims that must be believed, if we could only eliminate those claims that we must prove are false. Did I tell you about my aunt who lives on Pluto, and survives on Limburger cheese? Oh, I can't prove she exists, but we communicate via mental telepathy. What evidence do you have to prove my claim is false?

Thomas Rid is correct in the tweet above — "The burden of proof is inversing." It is just that he is the one who is attempting to 'inverse' it. He is responsible for proving his speculations, and no one should believe them until he has done so — readers have no obligation to prove his claims are false —
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/burden-of-proof.html
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/145/Proving-Non-Existence

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has repeatedly denied that Russia had any hand in the leaks that were damaging to the Clinton campaign. Here is Assange in an interview denying that accusation —

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sbT3_9dJY4
https://www.rt.com/news/365164-assange-interview-wikileaks-russia/

And here is Assange's statement regarding the 2016 U.S. Election on wikileaks.org —

https://wikileaks.org/Assange-Statement-on-the-US-Election.html
https://archive.is/Z7uTQ

Assange Statement on the US Election

8 November 2016

By Julian Assange

In recent months, WikiLeaks and I personally have come under enormous pressure to stop publishing what the Clinton campaign says about itself to itself. That pressure has come from the campaign’s allies, including the Obama administration, and from liberals who are anxious about who will be elected US President.

On the eve of the election, it is important to restate why we have published what we have.

The right to receive and impart true information is the guiding principle of WikiLeaks – an organization that has a staff and organizational mission far beyond myself. Our organization defends the public’s right to be informed.

This is why, irrespective of the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential election, the real victor is the US public which is better informed as a result of our work.

The US public has thoroughly engaged with WikiLeaks’ election related publications which number more than one hundred thousand documents. Millions of Americans have pored over the leaks and passed on their citations to each other and to us. It is an open model of journalism that gatekeepers are uncomfortable with, but which is perfectly harmonious with the First Amendment.

We publish material given to us if it is of political, diplomatic, historical or ethical importance and which has not been published elsewhere. When we have material that fulfills this criteria, we publish. We had information that fit our editorial criteria which related to the Sanders and Clinton campaign (DNC Leaks) and the Clinton political campaign and Foundation (Podesta Emails). No-one disputes the public importance of these publications. It would be unconscionable for WikiLeaks to withhold such an archive from the public during an election.

At the same time, we cannot publish what we do not have. To date, we have not received information on Donald Trump’s campaign, or Jill Stein’s campaign, or Gary Johnson’s campaign or any of the other candidates that fufills our stated editorial criteria. As a result of publishing Clinton’s cables and indexing her emails we are seen as domain experts on Clinton archives. So it is natural that Clinton sources come to us.

We publish as fast as our resources will allow and as fast as the public can absorb it.

That is our commitment to ourselves, to our sources, and to the public.

This is not due to a personal desire to influence the outcome of the election. The Democratic and Republican candidates have both expressed hostility towards whistleblowers. I spoke at the launch of the campaign for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, because her platform addresses the need to protect them. This is an issue that is close to my heart because of the Obama administration’s inhuman and degrading treatment of one of our alleged sources, Chelsea Manning. But WikiLeaks publications are not an attempt to get Jill Stein elected or to take revenge over Ms Manning’s treatment either.
Publishing is what we do. To withhold the publication of such information until after the election would have been to favour one of the candidates above the public’s right to know.

This is after all what happened when the New York Times withheld evidence of illegal mass surveillance of the US population for a year until after the 2004 election, denying the public a critical understanding of the incumbent president George W Bush, which probably secured his reelection. The current editor of the New York Times has distanced himself from that decision and rightly so.

The US public defends free speech more passionately, but the First Amendment only truly lives through its repeated exercise. The First Amendment explicitly prevents the executive from attempting to restrict anyone’s ability to speak and publish freely. The First Amendment does not privilege old media, with its corporate advertisers and dependencies on incumbent power factions, over WikiLeaks’ model of scientific journalism or an individual’s decision to inform their friends on social media. The First Amendment unapologetically nurtures the democratization of knowledge. With the Internet, it has reached its full potential.

Yet, some weeks ago, in a tactic reminiscent of Senator McCarthy and the red scare, Wikileaks, Green Party candidate Stein, Glenn Greenwald and Clinton’s main opponent were painted with a broad, red brush. The Clinton campaign, when they were not spreading obvious untruths, pointed to unnamed sources or to speculative and vague statements from the intelligence community to suggest a nefarious allegiance with Russia. The campaign was unable to invoke evidence about our publications—because none exists.

In the end, those who have attempted to malign our groundbreaking work over the past four months seek to inhibit public understanding perhaps because it is embarrassing to them – a reason for censorship the First Amendment cannot tolerate. Only unsuccessfully do they try to claim that our publications are inaccurate.
...

Those who believe that Assange has a special penchant for attacking Democrats have a short memory. It was routine for Republicans to call for his execution after the leaks regarding the Iraq war in 2010 —
https://collateralmurder.wikileaks.org/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8172916/WikiLeaks-guilty-parties-should-face-death-penalty.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/12/the-shameful-attacks-on-julian-assange/67440/

But the real problem here, is that none of this 'Russian Connection' conspiracy makes any sense.

Would the Russians really go to all this trouble to help Donald Trump? Why?

Because Hillary Clinton seemed more hawkish toward Russia than Trump in their public statements prior to the election? If this is what people believe, again, it is just more unsubstantiated speculation. And it is only barely plausible, because it is too vague to be taken seriously. Could it be true? Maybe, but no one knows, and certainly no one can prove it is true.

But even if this were true, how did the Russians supposedly help Trump? By revealing corruption within the competing political party, by releasing their private correspondence to the public. So it was revealed that the Democratic Party is corrupt, and supporters want to pretend that that corruption does not matter, because someone stole their correspondence. Oh brother. Are Republicans similarly corrupt? Maybe. But even if so, how would that absolve the Democrats?

This attempt to avoid responsibility by Democrats is just further proof of Democratic corruption. What matters is the authenticity of the damning communications that were released, and no one has disputed that.

Here is more on the absurdity of all this from Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie at reason.com —
https://reason.com/blog/2016/12/12/did-russia-really-hack-the-election
https://reason.com/blog/2016/12/12/cia-and-fbi-should-make-public-evidence

And of course, it is no surprise that Paul Krugman would run with this unsubstantiated story. Here is the 'Contra Krugman' podcast with Tom Woods and Robert Murphy, tearing apart another of Paul Krugman's asinine columns —
http://contrakrugman.com/ep-65-did-the-russians-hack-the-election/

Monday, December 5, 2016

Sam Harris Left Out The Tears

In previous posts, I wrote about some of the problems with Sam Harris's attacks on Donald Trump —
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 —

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_1xTw447no

Sunday, November 20, 2016

Goodbye Sam Harris

"The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie."
— Joseph A. Schumpeter, 'History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954)', p. 43n

"When analyzing fallacies, I have thought it still less advisable to mention particular names than in giving credit. To do so would have required special justice to each writer criticized, with exact quotations, account taken of the particular emphasis he places on this point or that, the qualifications he makes, his personal ambiguities, inconsistencies, and so on."
— Henry Hazlitt, 'Economics In One Lesson (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1946)', p. 11, Preface

In a previous post, I wrote about some of the problems with Sam Harris's attacks on Donald Trump —
http://maxautonomy.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-sam-harris-fail.html

I've offered no defense of Trump (in that post or any other) — I simply pointed out that Sam Harris's attack on Trump is an ad hominem fallacy, despite Harris's repeated denial of this obvious criticism.

In a podcast from October 26, 2016, Sam Harris complained at length regarding the numerous criticisms he has received for his attacks on Trump, even discussing the ad hominem, and why any uses of that fallacy in an argument are rightly despised.

Here is a partial transcript of that podcast, where Harris attempts to address the most common criticism he has received for his attack on Trump —

https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/the-lesser-evil
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcWmpHsszbg&t=4m3s (segment begins at 4:03)

. . .
Now, this brings me to the most frequent criticism I've heard. And this is yet another example of a catchphrase of sorts, distorting people's thinking. What I've now heard more times than I can count, is some variant of the following:

'You used to be such a careful thinker, but when you talk about Trump, all you produce are ad hominems. This shows that you are arguing from pure emotion, not reason.'
Again, I've received that every conceivable way. You know, people have made videos on that point, I've got e-mails, every comment thread I've seen has got some version of this. Um, OK. The ad hominem fallacy — 'ad hominem' means 'to the man'. One commits this fallacy, when rather than address an argument, or an idea, you merely attack its source. And this technique, if we can call it that, is rightly despised. It's not a valid form of argumentation.

For instance, when Donald Trump says that 'we shouldn't let Muslims into the country, because of the risk of terrorism', it is ad hominem to say 'Donald Trump is a bigot', full stop. As though that were an adequate response to the policy argument. Whether or not he is a bigot, is irrelevant to the question of whether it's wise or necessary to attempt to keep Muslims out of the country. If you want to argue against that, as I have, you need to say things like: 'it's impractical, or it's impossible, you know many of these people come from countries in Europe, for instance, just where and how are you going to apply a religious test to people from England, and France, and Germany. Or that it's needlessly inflammatory, and will prove counterproductive. Or that you'd be keeping out the very allies you need in your fight against extremism. Or that this would violate some deeper value, like the value of helping kids who are being pulverized in a civil war, through no fault of their own.

You have to say something that deals with the claim. And so it is with any policy position, he or anyone else might articulate. And I've done that — so far as Trump has said anything concrete, and not immediately self-contradictory about what he intends to do, I have addressed those issues. But what I have mainly been talking about, is whether or not Trump should be President. And whether or not he's a bigot, is relevant to that question. Many of his qualities as a person, and certainly most of his intellectual and moral qualities, are relevant to that question.

So, when I say of Trump, that he shouldn't be President, because he's dangerously uniformed, and, even in many respects, unintelligent — and he's a pathological liar, not an ordinary liar, but a liar of a sort you'd expect to meet only in a mental hospital — and that he's a deeply unethical person, one who is actually famous for treating people terribly — and that he's an anti-intellectual, someone who has no respect for real knowledge, much less the life of the mind — someone, for instance, who could perpetrate a fraud like Trump University, and not want to kill himself out of shame — and that he's a sexual predator, not merely married to one — and, yes, that he is very likely also a bigot — and that he is above all a bully and a con man, an obvious con man, the most obvious con man I have ever seen in public life. None of this is an example of an ad hominem fallacy. I've argued that giving Donald Trump more responsibility than any person on earth, is a bad idea because of who he is, because of the bad qualities he has in spades, and because of the good ones he so obviously lacks.
. . .

That almost sounds good, until you remember that the title of Sam Harris's podcast quoted above is 'The Lesser Evil'. And in the context of demonstrating that one candidate is the worst of two, even if you can prove that one candidate is a 'pathological liar', as Harris claims regarding Trump, you must also prove the other candidate does not lie, or, at a minimum, has been less destructive in their lying — that is, you must perform a thorough comparison of the actions of the two candidates, and the outcomes those kinds of actions will most likely lead to in the future.

This is a very tall order, and both Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan fail in their attempt to do this in Harris's podcast — that is, they avoid the critical effort in their discussion, by failing to perform a comparison of the most likely outcomes based on the past actions of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Harris's and Sullivan's denunciations do not contain an argument, and are useless in doing an honest and meaningful comparison of Trump and Hillary.

Denouncing a Presidential candidate, based on your subjective view of his character flaws is fine — but it is a pure ad hominem fallacy as part of an argument that his actions are worse than another's. The comparison of action is critical in demonstrating that a particular candidate is the lesser of anything — whereas Harris and Sullivan only provide a subjective denunciation and the insistence that one of the two is dramatically worse.

Andrew Sullivan is actually comical in this regard. Near the end of Harris's podcast, Harris attempts to get more detail from Sullivan on why Trump really is the greater evil, and Sullivan goes on in melodramatic and hyperbolic terms about how a Trump presidency will end U.S. democracy, while making no attempt to demonstrate any of his apocalyptic claims, and of course, a dismissal of where Obama and Hillary Clinton have behaved similarly, just as when Harris dismissed the corruption revealed by the Podesta e-mails as just 'how the sausage get's made' —

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcWmpHsszbg&t=54m42s (segment begins at 54:42)

. . .
Sam Harris: "... Like the Wikileaks e-mails, my reading of them thus far, is that there is really not much there that is surprising. I mean, like, how did you think the sausage was getting made, and what did you think the private communications in a campaign would look like? Right? I mean there are things there that we wish wouldn't be there, we wish people wouldn't operate this way, but there's nothing there that I've seen that is fundamentally shocking, or that tells us something we don't know, or didn't know, or that would be disqualifying to her candidacy."

Andrew Sullivan: "No, I agree. What's shocking however, is that people's private correspondence can be hacked and delivered this way. And I think the ability for politics to function at all, for government to function at all does require some lack of transparency. Any organization has to have something that's private, so that it can actually function."

Sam Harris: "But that is sort of a point in her favor. The Trump phenomenon is also a point in her favor. To go back to the comment you made a few minutes ago, that one of the things that is odious about her is that she believes you have to have a public and private conversation which are distinct, because the people can't handle the truth. There's so little appetite, or ability, for honest reasoning that people will seize upon your words, like the way she was using the phrase 'open borders' in context, as opposed to the way those words can be made to seem, and you'll never become President, or you'll never achieve the office you're seeking, because people are stupid and cynical, and the truth will be used against you, so you have to focus group everything.
. . .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcWmpHsszbg&t=110m45s (segment begins at 1:50:45)

. . .
Sam Harris: "So just to put a fine point on this, because given all of the heinous things we have said about the Clintons, and Hillary in particular, why does it matter that she be in charge, as opposed to him? I mean when you just imagine going forward in dealing with Russia or China, or the problem of jihadism, or anything else, any other challenge we're going to face, why do you feel that there really is a difference here worth caring about? Because many people think, they're both liars, they both, you know, her husband is a rapist, he's a rapist, at the very least they're both trailing accusations of rape. There is ugliness on both sides."

Andrew Sullivan: "Because he uniquely threatens our entire political system, from within, and he uniquely threatens global stability in a way that no president, no candidate for president, has ever done in this country. Just because we haven't been here before, there is this amazing complacency about what can happen in a democracy. And if you've read history, and you see this happening, it's textbook for how democracies perish. It, it is incredibly dangerous, at a level completely outside any previous candidate for the presidency, uh, outside anything in American history, short of the 1860s."

Sam Harris: "But spell that out a little more — it's outside any precedent with respect to ... "

Andrew Sullivan: "To the basic rules of liberal democracy, the basic core constructing ideas that make us the West.

Sam Harris: "But .. I mean, it's, it's outside any precedent in terms of his disrespect for the institutions, and his complete unawareness of what's going on in the world. I mean he's an ignoramus, and a narcissistic bully, who just wants to crash through every impediment he finds, and many of those impediments are our democratic system."

Andrew Sullivan: "Yes, and we've seen for example, that this so powerful in him, that he will continue to do this even though it sabotages himself. So, a man, if he were to be president, we would be the people he would be sabotaging. Our society would be what he would be casting asunder. We would be yanked to and fro towards escalating conflict, internally and internationally in a way that we have never been before. This country would be torn apart, their would be violence in the streets.
. . .

In short, Harris's criticism of Trump is an ad hominem fallacy, because his denunciations in no way demonstrate the greater evil. With respect to the claim of a greater evil, it is absolutely irrelevant that Trump is a 'pathological liar', or any other of the negative traits Sam Harris assigns — even if all of Harris's accusations regarding Trump are absolutely true, it does nothing to show that Hillary Clinton is superior in any of the same respects.

Let's be clear — the problem here has little to do with Harris's denunciations of Trump. The problem is that Harris expects readers and listeners to accept his adjective laden invective and analogy as some kind of scientific proof.

Paraphrasing Harris: 'Trump is a pathological liar such as the type you would find in a mental hospital — Trump has no respect for real knowledge — Trump has a thought process resembling a deflating balloon running chaotically in all directions — Trump's Presidential bid is akin to a five foot obese man thinking he rightly belongs on a basketball team.', etc. Well, this is colorful language, but it reveals much more about what Sam Harris thinks is an appropriate way to critique someone, than it reveals about Donald Trump.

Notice the quote from Henry Hazlitt at the top of this blog post, regarding the special requirements to treat an individual fairly, if you wished to criticize them for repeating a particular fallacy — do you think Sam Harris has met this standard in his denunciations of Trump? As I pointed out in my previous post, Harris took no pains to represent Trump accurately — just as he did not in the quotes below, from his podcast on November 10, 2016, where he stated that Trump recommended nuclear proliferation.

For just one example, think about what it would take to prove someone is a 'pathological liar', as Harris claims of Trump — it is not enough to merely show them lying, you have to show that they lie compulsively, as a matter of habit.

In this post, I called Hillary a liar (in the title), because I'm convinced that the 13 minute video I included showing her lying, is ample proof of at least that much —
http://maxautonomy.blogspot.com/2016/08/lying-about-hillary-clintons-lies.html

Hillary does seem pathological to me, because she repeatedly makes false statements. But notice that I did not make the accusation that Hillary is pathological, because it is just my subjective opinion, and, even more, I know that the 13 minute video I included does not demonstrate that she is pathological — it only demonstrates that Hillary lies repeatedly. If Sam Harris provided even remotely the same evidence to justify his denunciations of Trump, I might believe him — whereas, now I just see Harris as attempting to rationalize an obvious bias.

Sam Harris, 'pathological liar' ad hominem

https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg/status/796025058422452224

Here is a Sam Harris tweet from October 16, 2016, where Sam again insists that his denunciations are not an ad hominem, because he was attempting to show that Trump is the 'greater evil'. If you think Harris made an effective comparison between Trump and Hillary, as many of his readers seem to, then you accept this claim. But again, attacks on an individual do not constitute a comparison, and a comparison is required to justify any claim of greater or lesser. Calling someone a 'pathological liar', or 'a narcissist', or 'a bully', or a whatever, etc., neither proves those accusations, nor demonstrates that the subject possesses those qualities to any greater degree than anyone else —

https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg/status/787746752761765890

Here is a transcript of Sam Harris's podcast from November 10, 2016, entitled 'The Most Powerful Clown'. Again, it is primarily emotional invective, and reflects more on Sam Harris's character than on Trump's. I added a few comments, to point out some (but by no means all) of the falsehoods in Harris's statements, to show that if you are inclined to believe that Sam Harris does not misrepresent others when it suites him, you would be wrong —

https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/the-most-powerful-clown
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wthdOF32VKQ

The Most Powerful Clown

Sam Harris NOV 10, 2016

Well it has come to pass. President Trump. A man who many of us treated as a buffoon, and only took seriously as a threat at the eleventh hour, will be the 45th President of the United States. With a Republican Congress behind him, and with at least one vacancy, probably more, on the Supreme Court, to fill. Sooo, what went wrong? And, how bad is this?

Well, I think there are two parts to this story. The first is unambiguously depressing. And ... this is the part that has been seized on by most Liberals. But it’s only half the story, and it is this; Trump has ascended to power despite showing every sign of being dangerously unfit for it. And by exposing in himself, and in the electorate the worst that America has to offer. Racism, sexism, anti-semitism, a contempt for the most vulnerable among us, intimations of fascism, a positive love of bullying, total disdain for our democratic institutions, a willingness to make threats of political violence, just for the fun of it, a contempt for science, and a love of conspiracy theories. I mean I can run through it all again, the crazy things he said and the toxic alliances he’s made. The irony is if he had been merely half as bad, he would have seemed worse. He would have been more recognizably dangerous. There were so many awful moments, that the media couldn’t focus on them for long enough or weigh their significance. And the big things were as big as they get, right, “climate change is a hoax”, “why can’t we use our nuclear weapons?”, “maybe nuclear proliferation is a good thing?”, “let the Saudis, and the Japanese, and the South Koreans build their own nukes”, “who’s to say we should support our NATO alliances, what have they done for us?”, “Putin is a great leader”, “Maybe we should just default on our debt, cut a better deal”.
. . .

Notice that Harris misrepresents Tump's comments on nuclear proliferation. Here are links to what Trump actually said, along with a direct statement to the 'New York Times' that nuclear proliferation is the biggest problem facing the world —
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/us/politics/donald-trump-transcript.html
http://www.breitbart.com/video/2016/03/29/trump-i-hate-proliferation-but-it-would-be-better-if-japan-saudi-...

Trump: "... Biggest problem, to me, in the world, is nuclear, and proliferation."

And as I pointed out in my previous post, Harris oversimplifies Trump's comment regarding debt to serve his agenda in denouncing him. Trump specifically mentioned 'buying back' debt to 'refinance' it, which is actually a very common practice (also, notice again that Harris repeatedly violates the quote from Hazlitt above in misrepresenting Trump's views) —
http://maxautonomy.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-sam-harris-fail.html

Back to 'The Most Powerful Clown' —

https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/the-most-powerful-clown

. . .
Any one of those things should have ended it. But of course the little things were just as weird, and should have been just as disqualifying. I mean, we have just elected a president who has bragged about invading the dressing rooms of beauty pageant contestants so that he could see them naked, when they were effectively his employees, he ... he owned the pageant. And then he even bullied some of these young women publicly. Some on social media in the wee hours of the morning while campaigning for the presidency. And then he denied doing any of these things, when no denial was even possible. I mean we had all seen his tweets, and in response to the astonishment of the media, he looked the American people in the eye and said “No one respects women more than I do, no one”. And half the country accepted that as what, the truth? As good theatre? As sketch comedy?

There are really no words to describe how far from normal we have drifted here. David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, described the situation the night of the election, in a piece entitled “An American Tragedy”. I’ll read a little of that so you get a sense of what the liberal elites were thinking at 3 AM —

"The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit—and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety."
...

"In the coming days, commentators will attempt to normalize this event. They will try to soothe their readers and viewers with thoughts about the “innate wisdom” and “essential decency” of the American people. They will downplay the virulence of the nationalism displayed, the cruel decision to elevate a man who rides in a gold-plated airliner but who has staked his claim with the populist rhetoric of blood and soil. ...

The commentators, in their attempt to normalize this tragedy, will also find ways to discount the bumbling and destructive behavior of the F.B.I., the malign interference of Russian intelligence, the free pass—the hours of uninterrupted, unmediated coverage of his rallies—provided to Trump by cable television, particularly in the early months of his campaign. We will be asked to count on the stability of American institutions, the tendency of even the most radical politicians to rein themselves in when admitted to office. Liberals will be admonished as smug, disconnected from suffering, as if so many Democratic voters were unacquainted with poverty, struggle, and misfortune. There is no reason to believe this palaver. There is no reason to believe that Trump and his band of associates—Chris Christie, Rudolph Giuliani, Mike Pence, and, yes, Paul Ryan—are in any mood to govern as Republicans within the traditional boundaries of decency. Trump was not elected on a platform of decency, fairness, moderation, compromise, and the rule of law; he was elected, in the main, on a platform of resentment. Fascism is not our future—it cannot be; we cannot allow it to be so—but this is surely the way fascism can begin."

I think most of that is true, unfortunately, but it’s not the whole truth. And the parts that are true, are probably not worth dwelling on at this point. I’m not sure how useful it’ll be to stay in the well of blame and despair and and to resist “normalizing” the situation but, it is true that the ‘normalizing’ seems like an act of prayer. Just consider Trump’s victory speech, which was alarming for how un-Trumpian it was. I mean it read like it was written by Van Jones on ambien. It was the most anodyne bit of fence mending. But you can feel the desperation in the media, to read into his surprisingly gracious notes. The normalcy that Remnick is talking about here. I mean, maybe we were all just wrong about him, right? Maybe he’s a nice guy after all. What are the chances of that? Is it possible that an ethical person merely pretended to be a total asshole for 18 months? It seems somehow farfetched. But what a way to make of the fact that Trump had nothing but nice things to say about Clinton. What happened to “Lock her up?” Does anyone care about the Trump who spoke on the night of the election was totally unrecognizable? Who did his supporters think they had elected? Were his supporters surprised to see him merely praise Hillary? Is it all theatre? Who is this guy? Will he attempt to do anything he promised to do? Does anyone know? Does Ivanka have any idea what her dad will do as President?
. . .

Notice that Harris's quote of David Remnick above is a kind of appeal to authority fallacy — what the 'liberal elites' were thinking? I have no idea why Harris thinks there is such a thing as a 'liberal elite', but what anyone is thinking is completely irrelevant, unless they have a compelling argument for thinking it.

It certainly is not clear why Harris would waste his listener's time by reading David Remnick's writing into his podcast, since it adds nothing that Harris had not already said — it is just more emotional invective, without substance.

Regarding the supposed 'bumbling and destructive behavior of the F.B.I.', for example, I can only assume that this is meant to refer to the F.B.I. doing anything at all regarding Hillary Clinton — but a good case certainly cannot be made for doing nothing, since it is a trivial exercise to show that Hillary violated the law. That is, unless you do not care about a core principle of democracy, like the rule of law (as Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan at least pretended to be so concerned about elsewhere). See the details here —
http://maxautonomy.blogspot.com/2016/07/mediamatters-hillary-clintons-shill.html

Back to 'The Most Powerful Clown' —

https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/the-most-powerful-clown

. . .
Now I’ve gotten a fair amount of grief from people at this point for having been wrong about the election. I’m not sure what they mean. I admit I did jinx it by posting a suitably repellent picture of Trump on Twitter early in the day and say ‘Bye bye Donald’. Of course that wasn’t a prediction, I was simply saying how nice it would be to never think about him again. Of course when I sent that tweet the polls were giving him around a 20% chance of winning. Now whether the polls were wrong or not is anyone's guess at this point — a 20% chance of winning is not nothing, right? Spend a few minutes with some dice and see how often a 20% chance comes up. It comes up quite frequently sometimes on the very first roll. So, I jinxed the election. Sorry about that. But surely it can’t have been a failure of judgement to have trusted the most reputable polls. Basically, everyone was doing that. What else was there to trust? Just the torrents of hatred I saw on social media? But the story about what happened with the polls will be interesting in the weeks and months ahead.

The truth is I always had a bad feeling about the election, and that’s why I talked about it so much on this podcast. I could tell that Hillary’s flaws as a candidate were causing people to ignore Trump’s flaws as a human being. Well, we’re about to find out how high a price we and the rest of the world will pay for that. Speaking personally I can say, I left more or less everything on the field. I know I alienated many of you in how fully I disparaged Trump. And I kept doing it even at the risk of boring those of you who actually agreed with me because I thought it was so important. I don’t honestly see how I could have done any more, and at this moment that’s actually a good feeling. I was preparing myself for this moment and I certainly know many scientists, business people and writers who can’t say the same. But who knows, the fact that they held their tongues may appear fairly prudent at this moment. We’re about to see an astonishingly vindictive man sweep to power with not many check to his power. He has threatened to go after his enemies. To jail Hillary, to sue the women who accused him of sexual assault, to change our libel laws, to go after the Washington Post. Again, this is not a normal moment in American history.

Now many people ask me whether I regret not backing Bernie Sanders. If I’m so trusting of polls, why didn’t I trust the polls that showed him to have a better chance than Clinton against Trump. Because Sanders was totally untested, he had never been subjected to opposition research the way Clinton had. We knew what the Republicans were going to say about Clinton. Who knows what they would have done to Sanders. It is true he would have drawn some of the isolationist and anti-establishment vote that went to Trump. And perhaps he would have turned out more voters than Clinton did, and it looks like that could have been decisive. It seems that Hillary got 6 millions fewer votes than Obama did in 2012, and 10 million fewer than he got in 2008. So, democrats didn’t show up and I hope all those Bernie supporters who stayed home, or voted who third-party will be paying attention over the next four years. But I share the view that the election was generally a repudiation of the left, and the political correctness in particular as much as it was just a vote for change. It was a repudiation of black and brown identity politics by white identity politics and it’s important to point out that this isn’t the same as racism. I don’t believe that the majority of the people who voted for Trump were motivated by racism. There are people who voted for Obama twice who voted for Trump. Racism cannot be the best way to explain that. This is where the prevailing analysis on the left is wrong, of the sort that I just read from David Remnick in the New Yorker.

Yes, we have just elected a man who was officially endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, so you can be sure that every white racist in the country voted for Trump, but there are millions of other decent people who have reasonable concerns about a movement like Black Lives Matter. Most of these people probably voted for Trump too. These people are not racist they were simply recoiling from charges of racism and from a toxic brand of identity politics. Much of what has been coming out of the left, not everything, but much of it, particularly about race, and about law and order, and about Islamophobia, and about terrorism, about issues that are fundamental to the security of our society, has had all the moral clarity and intellectual honesty of the OJ verdict. Which is to say none at all. I’m confident that many people don’t perceive Trump to be a dangerous conman, in the way that I do, probably voted for him out of sheer exasperation. They were sick of being called racists for not worrying about Halloween costumes on our Ivy League campuses. So millions of these people, along with real racists, told all you whinging social justice warriors at Yale and Brown to go fuck yourselves. And can you really blame them? I mean, safe-spaces, trigger warnings, new gender pronouns, getting Muslim student groups to de-platform speakers like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Bill Maher. Was that the cause of your generation? That’s the trench you’re willing to die in? The question is; would a Democratic campaign that leaned even further to the left have prevailed further in this situation? I doubt it, and does Sanders have anything sensible to say about foreign policy? Would he have been to address fears about terrorism. It certainly didn’t seem that way at the time. I suspect that this really is the crux of the issue. At least it’s the main reason why even those who saw Trump’s flaws didn’t care about them. The problem that worried me the whole time is the left’s total failure to speak honestly about Islam and terrorism and the refugee crisis in Europe. This I think was decisive. Certainly, it was one of the things that had it gone the other way would have given us a different result.
. . .

I'd say Harris gives some good criticism in the last paragraph quoted above about the moral bankruptcy and cowardice of the left — thought I'm not sure he fully realizes the implications of what he is saying, since this is the group with which he has aligned himself — 'what does that liberal elite think'?

But in any case, no one knows, including Sam Harris, if Democrats saying something sensible about foreign policy would have been decisive, or given us a different result.

Back to 'The Most Powerful Clown' —

https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/the-most-powerful-clown

. . .
Admittedly, it seems strange to cite polls at this point, but what else can I do? The exit polls show that the people who said their primary concerns were terrorism and immigration, voted overwhelmingly for Trump. Whereas those who concerned about the economy or foreign policy voted for Clinton. So, it wasn’t “the economy stupid” this time around, though economic fears certainly played a role. And it wasn’t just poor whites who supported Trump. The median income of Trump voters was $72,000. And I think that in this election concerns about terrorism and immigration largely boiled down to a concern about Islamism, and to the fear and distrust provoked by liberal lies about it. Immigration means other things of course, but I don’t think it’s mainly that there a lot of white people whose median income is $72,000 who want to pick strawberries for a living. If my collisions on social media told me anything over the last year, it’s that many people were nearly single issue voters when it came to Islam. I would bet that this accounts for many more people than voted for third-party candidate. Which was also probably decisive. The fact that we have a president who wouldn’t even use the phrase “Islamic extremism”, who could even say things like “terrorism has less to do with Islam than any other religion”, right, and the fact that Clinton seemed to embrace this delusion, even though she did on occasion use the phrase “radical jihadism”, as though that made any sense. That was a terrible problem. And of course the fact that she and her husband have taken tens of millions of dollars from the Saudis and other Islamist regimes didn’t help. Couple that with this unexplained desire to increase the number of Syrian refugees by 550% without ever acknowledging what is going wrong in Europe. This was a deal breaker from many people, and I heard these people endlessly over the last year.

And the problem of course is people are right to be worried about Islamism and Jihadism, and all the left has offered on this point are lies, and sanctimony and charges of racism and bigotry. Worrying about Islam more than any other religion at this moment is not a sign of racism or bigotry. Muslims themselves should be worried more about Islam at this moment than about Mormonism, Anglicanism, or Judaism. This is basic human sanity, and most people know it. But Clinton was the sort of politician, who in the immediate aftermath of the Orlando massacre, spoke only about gun control, and then issued grave warnings about a rise in Islamophobia. When we had just suffered yet another jihadist atrocity on American soil. This was unforgivably stupid. And I knew it at the time that this was the sort of stupidity that could pave the way for Trump. I even wrote a section of a speech that I thought Clinton should give about Islamism and jihadism, and put it on my blog. It would have been so easy for her to have made sense on this issue, and to have differentiated a sane understanding of jihadism from bigotry against Muslims in general. But she couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t do it. All of these things contributed to her loss, and to the rise of Trump.
. . .

It is interesting that Sam Harris would call out the tens of millions of dollars the Clinton's have received from Saudi Arabia, and other authoritarian, Islamist regimes, but Harris leaves out the more important point that arms sales to those same regimes jumped under Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State, for the period October 2010 to September 2012 —
http://maxautonomy.blogspot.com/2016/09/paul-krugman-and-hillary-clinton-birds.html

And again, it is fascinating that Sam Harris does not seem to know who he is aligned with — I know he is not a fan of Hillary Clinton (only claiming that she is supposedly a much lesser evil, when compared with Trump) — but did Harris really have any expectation that a politically correct, career politician, would take a stand against one of the world's dominant religions?

Any expectation that Hillary Clinton would not mention a propaganda term like 'Islamophobia' positively, strikes me as pure delusion. Of course, Hillary Clinton did not come out with criticism of Islam, after an act of Islamic terrorism.

Why on earth would anyone expect her to do that?

Back to 'The Most Powerful Clown' —

https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/the-most-powerful-clown

. . .
So the question now is, how do we move forward having to declare the next president to be an absolute jackass, and a sexual predator? And as I’ve said in a previous podcast a liar of the sort one would only expect to find in a mental hospital? How do we move from making jokes about placing the nuclear codes into the hands of a dangerous narcissist to actually placing the nuclear codes into his hands? Well, I’m afraid we just do. And we hope that this man who appears to lie about everything, has also been lying about how awful a person he is. Let’s hope he isn’t who who he has seem to be. Let’s hope that he really is a cipher, let’s hope he was only pretending not to believe in climate change. Let’s hope that he was only pretending to admire Vladimir Putin. Let’s hope that he was only pretending to believe the sorts of conspiracy theories that helped get him elected. Let’s hope he really is a con man without any core commitments, other than to maintain his own fame and glory. Because then there’s a chance that knowledgeable people might be able to influence him.

I thought president Obama struck the right note yesterday, we all must hope for Trump’s success at this point. We want his presidency to be a good one. It’s as if we’re all on an airplane together, and the real pilot has died. And now a man who has never flown an airplane has taken over the controls, and is attempting an emergency landing, and we’re all stuck in the back of the plane. So we’re rooting for the man in the cockpit. Of course, before he got his hands on the controls, some of us complained about how unqualified he was. There were a few other people back here with a lot of time spent flying planes. But this guy stormed the cockpit, and now he’s in the pilot seat, and the runway is in view, and we are out of time. So let’s hope he’s talking to people in air traffic control. The problem of course is, it actually matters who is in the tower. Just think about who Trump has surrounded himself with — Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie, Sarah Palin, Mike Pence — this is a clown car of ideologues and incompetents with a couple of religious maniacs thrown in. But again we want him to land this plane and it doesn’t have to be pretty. It doesn’t matter if we all wind up covered in vomit. We will be grateful just to be alive. And I will be very grateful if after four years Donald Trump hasn’t set back human progress a generation.

This may all sound like hyperbole, but who knows what sort of mistakes this man is capable of. And if you said that about Clinton, you were just wrong. Even with all her flaws we have no idea who Trump is, or what he will do. He probably doesn’t even know. But we do know that he has less understanding about the responsibilities he’s about to assume than any president before him. Indeed, he has less understanding than any candidate most of us have ever conceived of. So, let’s hope he’s a quick study, and let's hope there are thousands of good people who are willing to work for him. Which brings up a point I saw raised on social media by a few people — no matter how horrified you are by this result, no matter how judgmental you are of the people who enabled him, people like Paul Ryan, you have to hope that the best people available will come forward now, and be willing to serve in Trump’s administration. People with good reputation and real expertise. We can’t afford to question the motives and integrity of anyone who would join this administration. We want the best people we can get in the door. We have to hope that being president of the United States brings out the best in Donald Trump. Campaigning for the presidency brought out the worst, it showed what he’s like as an embattled narcissist and fabulist and demagogue, but now he's won, right? Now he will be surrounded by people seeking the warm glow of his power, now he will inspire fear, actual fear not merely scorn in his critics. He is no longer just a clown, he is the most powerful clown on Earth. We have to hope that winning to this degree will pacify some of his demons. Is there a historical or psychological precedent for this? I have no idea. But we’re about to find out what happens to a man with a famously, palpably, visibly unhealthy ego, who suddenly triumphed over everyone who ever doubted him. This is a man who when he voted in New York, at his polling place, got jeered by a crowd on Tuesday. In a city that voted 87% against him, and one day he’s going to ride back into town on Air Force One — imagine the way his ego feels right now. Just imagine the satisfaction Trump will feel when he takes possession of the White House and shows president Obama the door. The first black president who humiliated him in front of all the Washington elites at the White House correspondents dinner. Go watch footage of that, all those laughs at his expense. Trump has been a punchline for decades. He’s been the Rodney Dangerfield of billionaires, but that moment with Obama at the podium was the worst. And now he gets to tell Barack Hussein Obama to get out of his house and then tear his legacy to shreds. You’ve got the first black president being shown the door by a man who always questioned his legitimacy in racist terms, and has been endorsed by the KKK. Only Shakespeare could do this moment justice.

So, while Trump seems like he could become some sort of Caligula with an iPhone, we have to hope that our democratic institution will restrain him. That the awesome responsibilities thrust his way, the responsibility of running a superpower will bring out the better angels of his nature, if he has any. So I think normalizing this mess might be the best we can do for the time being. Needless to say, a pendulum swing into left wing identity politics will not be helpful, but it seems extremely likely to occur. In fact it’s already happening with these ridiculous protests under the banner of “Not my president”. Good luck with that.

How many of you voted for a third-party? Or didn’t vote at all? What we need are smart ethical people in the political center, who can defend freedom of speech and science, and the norms of civil discourse from their enemies on both the right and the left. And so far as I can do anything useful in that area, I will do my best. That is part of what this podcast is for. And if you guys have any ideas about who I should talk to on the podcast about the fate of civilization, I will be very happy to hear your ideas. And I promise I will be getting to interesting topics totally unrelated to politics, in fact I will mostly do this. Because what I say about politics doesn’t seem to do much.

As always you can support the podcast at samharris.org/support, and you can also support it on a per episode basis at patreon.com/samharris. About 2% of listeners regularly support the podcast now, and I’m hoping to bring that up to 10% — that will be a game changer. And if you are already a supporter, please know that your help is greatly appreciated. And once again thanks for listening, until next time.

And here is the ultimate payoff from the hours of Sam Harris's podcasts denouncing Trump — notice this quote from Harris in the center paragraph above —

"And if you said that about Clinton, you were just wrong."

If you do not agree with Harris on this, you cannot be correct — even if Harris cannot explain why.

And, ironically, all this from the author of a book on the harm of lying —
https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/new-ebook-lying

As an interesting comparison, notice that both Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan exude what Thomas Sowell described as 'The Vision of the Anointed', in that they have a vision, or world view, that they wish to enforce on others via a political process, and verifying that view with evidence is not an important concern —
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=thomas+sowell+the+vision+of+the+anointed
https://fee.org/articles/the-vision-of-the-anointed-self-congratulation-as-a-basis-for-social-policy/

Monday, November 7, 2016

The Sam Harris Fail

Quoted below is a blog post from October 2016, by the well-known atheist Sam Harris, entitled 'Trump in Exile'. This blog post is perversely fascinating, in that it was written by a man who gained fame primarily as an atheist and supposed guardian of rationality, in his critiques of religion. For example, see Harris's books 'The End of Faith' and 'Letter to a Christian Nation'.

The striking thing about Harris's blog post quoted below, is that Harris wrote nothing to support his hyperbolic conclusion that a Trump presidency would be a monumental disaster in comparison to a Hillary Clinton presidency. Harris just seems to expect readers to believe it, because he does —

https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/trump-in-exile2

Trump In Exile

Sam Harris OCT 13, 2016

It is a cliché, of course, to claim that a presidential election is the most important in living memory. But we arrived at that point in the 2016 campaign many months ago, when both sides declared their opponent unqualified for office. Unfortunately, this time the cliché is true, and one side is actually right. A choice this stark proves that there is something wrong with our political system.

Hillary Clinton is a terribly flawed candidate for the presidency, and this has allowed millions of otherwise sane Americans to imagine that she is less fit for office than Donald Trump is. Much depends on a majority of the electorate seeing through this moral and political illusion in the weeks ahead.
. . .

This may be the most important presidential election in living memory, but you would not know it from anything Harris wrote later in his blog post. Sadly, Harris gives no indication that his melodrama is even worthy of consideration — despite his claim that this is 'the most important presidential election in recent memory'. Well, if Harris really believes that, he might have worked a little harder at making a convincing case — it should not have been that hard, given 'a choice this stark', as he put it.

Note that I am making no attempt here to defend Trump — I am pointing out that Harris has not given his insults substance, and so they are ad hominem attacks. Harris does provide some specifics about Trump's 'sexual predations', but they are useless as a point of comparison with Hillary Clinton, since, as Harris acknowledges below, Bill Clinton 'can probably match Trump indiscretion for indiscretion'.

According to Harris, Hillary is obviously massively better than Trump, but at the same time she lacks the character to leave a marriage to a Trump equivalent. I know Hillary's supporters love to dismiss this obvious criticism — since Bill Clinton isn't running for president — but it is pretty nonsensical to claim that Hillary's character is markedly superior to Trump's, while simultaneously making the claim that Hillary's character is such that she made a Trump equivalent her lifelong partner.

Well, at least Harris openly acknowledged that Hillary Clinton is 'terribly flawed' — but that phrase is a euphemism that amounts to a terribly flawed attempt at demonstrating objectivity. It has been well documented that Hillary Clinton's behavior has been criminal, so referring to her as 'terribly flawed' does not do justice to the terrible things she has done. You can read more about that here —
http://maxautonomy.blogspot.com/2016/09/paul-krugman-and-hillary-clinton-birds.html
http://maxautonomy.blogspot.com/2016/08/lying-about-hillary-clintons-lies.html
http://maxautonomy.blogspot.com/2016/07/mediamatters-hillary-clintons-shill.html

The Clintons at Donald Trump's wedding in 2005.