On a recent podcast, Sam Harris attacked Black Lives Matter and made the argument that BLM is “dangerous and divisive and retrograde” because “all identity politics is detestable.” He’s wrong. In fact, he’s more than wrong. He’s wrong to the point of being profoundly asinine.
It has reached the point where I just cringe every time Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins say almost anything about any subject. Harris has now come out and said that he would vote for a Ben Carson or Ted Cruz over Noam Chomsky for president because, even though he knows those people are highly dishonest and unqualified, he thinks they do take the real threat of reactionary Muslims seriously.
I’m sure by now you’ve seen that idiotic interview on Fox News with Reza Aslan about his new book about Jesus. The interviewer, who is Fox’ religion correspondent FFS, seems absolutely baffled why a Muslim would write a book about Christianity and Aslan rightly shows how ridiculous she’s being:
The Supreme Court handed down rulings in the last two cases of its term this morning, Harris v Quinn (whether public sector unions could charge fees to non-members) and Burwell v Hobby Lobby, the now-infamous challenge to the ACA’s contraception mandate. In both cases, I think the results are wrong but probably the best we could have hoped for given the court’s current configuration.
Here’s a huge difference between Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris: Hitchens won’t endorse the use of torture based on nearly impossible hypothetical situations. Harris does. I’ll take Hitchens every day and twice on the sabbath.
Here’s the latest episode in Katherine Harris’ months-long campaign to seize the title of America’s most batshit crazy politician. Several members of the US House of Representatives were listed on her campaign website as having endorsed her candidacy for the Senate. The problem? None of them had done so.
Several members of the U.S. House called the Harris campaign to complain Wednesday after the St. Petersburg Times notified them of the endorsements listed on Harris’ Web site. Minutes later, their names were removed.
The list of politicians whose names came down includes Reps. Ginny Brown-Waite of Brooksville, Cliff Stearns of Ocala, Mark Foley of West Palm Beach and Jeff Miller of the Panhandle.
Oops. And here’s the funniest part:
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I find myself constantly vacillating between taking politics seriously and viewing it solely as a form of entertainment. As Mencken noted so famously, democracy is the only truly amusing form of government ever invented. On those days when I’m looking only for entertainment from the political system, I want all the Katherine Harris I can get.
You may remember Harris as the Florida elections official during the 2000 election, where she resembled nothing so much as a demented Stepford Wife with her bad makeup and her deer-caught-in-headlights facial expression on camera. Well she’s now running for the Senate and doing such a bad job of it that the Republican party actually recruited people to run against her in the primary.
Her campaign hit quite a snag recently when a defense contractor convicted of bribery (in the same case that nailed Congressman Duke Cunningham) admitted that he made illegal contributions to Harris’ campaign as well. That’s not likely to help her recover with polls showing that she trails the incumbent by a full 20 points in the race. Nonetheless, Harris has announced that she’s staying in the race and using $10 million she inherited from her father to keep running.
Bravo, Ms. Harris. Don’t let the bastards get you down. You keep on running and I’ll keep on laughing. And remember that when you lose, there’s sure to be a show on Fox waiting for you. I may have to get Tivo for that.
The Huffington Post has an article in the wake of the massacre at a mosque in New Zealand calling Islamophobia a “global crisis.” It looks at anti-Muslim extremism by the far-right, but also briefly mentions Sam Harris, Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins. American Atheists shared the article on their Facebook page and my friend Seth Andrews responded, in part:
Adam Lee has a very compelling article about the problems of so many prominent atheists rejecting the fights for social justice that most atheists are pretty strongly in favor of. It recounts many incidents and situations, like Sam Harris interviewing Charles Murray and the Mythcon garbage, and makes a strong case.
You can’t find a better representation of the American right wing than this. In Virginia, a Muslim group is trying to build a new mosque and a bunch of dumbass, ignorant goobers showed up and started screaming about how all Muslims are terrorists. It got so bad that a sheriff’s deputy had to break up the meeting. I’m so glad Sam Harris tells us that Islamophobia is a totally made up thing and doesn’t actually exist.
Sam Harris once said in an exchange with Glenn Greenwald, “There is no such thing as ‘Islamophobia.’ This is a term of propaganda designed to protect Islam from the forces of secularism by conflating all criticism of it with racism and xenophobia.” Sorry Sam, you’re completely full of shit. Want yet another disproof of this idiotic claim? Read this article about what happened when a picture was posted of a group of Muslims peacefully praying on a beach:
Dispatches From the Culture Wars
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