RE: I Used To Be A Fan But I Am Now Shocked, Disgusted And Appalled With Sam Harris
May 31, 2017 at 6:57 pm
Quote:That's not cherry-picking. Cherry-picking is when you throw out the parts you don't agree with and only focus on the parts you agree with. i.e. exactly what you're doing.
You have this totally backwards.
"Picking" does not involve throwing out, it involves selecting like you're doing. I'm listening to the whole thing and realizing that it is impossible to know exactly which parts are in the mind of Harris at any given moment.
Quote:I'm recognizing the parts I don't agree with and consider bigoted; not ignoring them.
While leaving out the parts concerned with political correctness and ignoring them. Cherry picking. You don't know what Harris thinks about trans people from this interview but you're convinced that you do.
Quote:You're just burying your head in the sand about complicity in the face of bigotry. If we agree that referring to transgender people as "weirdos" is bigoted and we agree that it's bigoted to be complicit in the face of bigotry then we agree that Sam Harris is being bigoted.
The reason why you agree with premises that entail a conclusion but you deny the conclusion is simply because, like many people, you're terrible at logic and full of bias.
You just assume complicity and that's where you're wrong. You're sure he's complicit with every single word said in a rant and that's a terrible assumption to make. Many here (who are not transphobic) don't agree with you. Do you think everyone is illogical when they don't jump to the same conclusions you do?
Referring to trans people as weirdos is bigoted. Did Harris do that? No
It is also bigoted to be complicit is the face of bigotry. No disagreement there, but was Harris complicit with the parts you cherry picked or complicit with the parts you ignore? Again, you think you know the answer but you don't know that and can't know that because you're not a mind reader. There were several ideas at play and you just focus on the ones that make you angry and ignore the others.
Again, here is what Harris said about that interview:
"I think at one point in my conversation with Douglas Murray, he said some things people interpreted as being disparaging of transgendered people, and I was faulted for not pushing back at that point. I think I took Douglas to be just railing against political correctness on this, and really every other topic."
He's telling us it was about political correctness in his mind. But you think you know better than the person himself what was in his mind. You cherry pick the bad words and attribute complicity to those and think that represents logic?
There is simply not enough in this interview to justify your accusations. As I said, those are strong accusations that require strong evidence, they're not labels to be applied on an assumption of intent.
I'm willing to consider that Harris could be transphobic if you can show anything he's said or done to indicate so... but this isn't it.
If god was real he wouldn't need middle men to explain his wants or do his bidding.