Posted: Apr 11, 2019 11:01 pm
Thommo wrote:
Any chance you can give the Cliff notes?
Five minutes in I'd got as far as Sam Harris's statement that "Islam is the mother lode of bad ideas" is somehow the same as the manifesto of the Christchurch shooter and he and Mehdi Hassan had got into a twitter spat of which no details were given and kinda zoned out.
That's one thing that Sam Harris has apparently said, although you will not find a clip of him saying it in the above video. It does seem that Harris' politics are 'wrong' from a certain perspective. This is a perspective that at least a quorum of active members here now hold. I don't know how it's possible to summarize his politics in a few words, because he has said and written an awful lot of stuff. Like the presenter in the above video, my first exposure to atheist 'movement' politics was "End of Faith". I found it quite compelling at the time, but it didn't take long before I began to feel that Harris is over-reaching, albeit as an articulate and animated public speaker. What more can I say? Compared with Hitchens, i find that most public intellectuals in this vein just kind of suck.
I watched the whole thing. The guy could have made his point in about a third of the time he took.