I know some of you worship this fucking moron and it's not surprising.

Some insight from from someone smarter than you:

I just have a few words to say regarding that hateful, unsophisticated little imp Sam Harris, since I got into a verbal argument with one of his acolytes the other day, which is a thing that gets tossed out a lot to "prove" Sam Harris is a SUPAR SMERT INTELLIGANT MAN; he has a phd in cognitive neuroscience.

For the record: Cognitive neuroscience is a bunch of hacky bullshit which should not be confused with the legitimate science of neurology

Cognitive neuroscience is bascially putting people into fMRIs and asking them a bunch of questions and then drawing conclusions based on the images seen on the scan. It is an interdisciplinary study and people in this field come from a variety of backgrounds; Sam Harris had a M.A. in philosophy before he got into the cognitive neuroscience phd program. These people usually have an extremely simplified understanding of the brain.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuros...e/#.VyTfnUebLIU

Meta-studies show that the entire field is just an incoherent mess and the accumulated data cannot show a fucking insightful thing. How are you even going to control for other thoughts and emotions besides those related to your research question influencing the results of the fMRI?

http://www.amazon.com/Reliability-Cognitive-Neuroscience-Meta-Meta-Analysis-Press/dp/0262018527

In conclusion, cognitive neuroscience is bascially phrenology 2.0, and is the ideological companion of evolutionary psychology, which is basically eugenics 2.0

Reactionary ideology wrapped in the trappings of sciences in an attempt to it look objective

Don't believe this stupid bullshit

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Sam_Harris

Yer not doin so good drinkin yerself to death, buddy. Can you make yerself interesting and tell us about yer therapist's vibrating panties?

I didn't have enough alcohol to kill myself my tolerance is too high. So I've decided to choose life. Shrinks wear talking underwear?

According to Figgs they do.

BTW, I'm glad you didn't succeed in the alcohol suicide. Get yerself a companion animal, to give yer life some purpose. If a dog is too much for you, I'd suggest hamsters.

"Get a hamster" reminds me of a guy from another board that was really into sadism, Jim goad, Peter sotos, the beauty of victimhood ect ect...., on day he cried he was going to quit the internet because his ferret had crawled into the cracks of his computer chair and he accidentally suffocated it.

well, he had to have some explanation for how it ended up up his ass.

^GOLD and QOTD

He is, but I've only got so much spleen to vent and there's far more worthy targets.

I see what you did there

Is Sam Harris aware he has been made such short work of here?

Me too but I figured discretion and valor and all.

I wonder why Ditchens and Harris types seem to be so prevalent on the net but much less so in RL, like MRAs.

Usually atheists tend to be quiet about it their beliefs, or lack thereof. I know I am I like Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris, but they aren't always the best spokespeople. That said, I'm not terribly interested in changing anyone's mind. It only comes up when someone is trying to shove their beliefs down my throat or shows a lack of respect for my lack of belief.

I'm an atheist but I don't want those smug pricks speaking for me. I prefer someone like John Gray.

I gave up on Straw Dogs after about thirty or forty pages. Why read all two hundred or so pages when Bill Gaines summed it all up when he said, "People are no damned good."

Yeah, I know what you're saying but I find his real deal skepticism bracing. His atheisism doesn't mean he kowtows to scientism or even rationalism.

His other books are more interesting and even funny, particularly good is his book The Immoralization Commission about Soviet utopianism. Black Mass is really good too.

Yeah, I love Harris, but I'm not crazy about the "scientism" for lack of a better word. I'm a humanities bum, and I come at atheism from a different angle than someone who was raised a snake handler and got an engineering degree. I'm not making a value judgment, atheists like to Hecht, Hitchens, and Christina are a little bit more on my wavelength.

Hitchens was good essayist before he became a drunk and turned into his old man, like Amis too. It is an English disease, becoming a drunk blowhard in one's later years. His 'piece' on Polanski was a particular lowpoint for him as a writer, one can almost see the DTs right there on the page. A friend of mine was taking a course with him around this time and apparently he was a lush wreck by this point.

Someone bought me a collection of his last essays and it is uneven but better than his terrible, masturbatory auto-biography which I gave up on. Good essay in there on the romanticized Stalinist and enthusiastic state executioner Che.

I like my atheisism neat, Cioran or even adolescent but funny, mad Nietzche.

Reading lightweights like Ditchens run down all believers when neither of them would be worthy of shining the shoes of Kierkegaard or Pascal gets on my nerves.

Hard for me to buy that either of them understands life better than Flannery O'Connor or Tolstoy either.

Lol. That made me flash on Hazel Motes from Wise Blood and laugh.

Funny, I've thought the same thing about Amis as well. I haven't read Hitchens's autobiography yet, but I'm going to get around to it. I see your point about Kierkegaard or Pascal, but on the other hand Ed Feser is no Kierkeg
aard, or even a Harris for that matter. But I'm starting to get outside of my area of expertise.

Also fuck SE Cupp. She makes Harris look intelligent. And I mean fuck her literally right in her dumb horse mouth and ass. Run her through the facial abuse guantlet

There is no God. People who believe there is are mentally retarded.

Yes, by all means fuck SE Cupp. But doesn't that belong on a different thread? Harris is an atheist, SE Cupp is a conservative who just happens to be an atheist. I don't know if I'd contribute, but I'd definitely follow a thread that bashed SE Cupp.

I concur with Nassim on all points. Also, as an aside, am I the only one who thinks she signs herself "SE Cupp" for the "E-Cup" connotation? That broad's as subtle as a hand grenade in a barrel of oatmeal. [/foghorn_leghorn]

Or if you say SE Cupp really fast it sounds like "C" cup. Yeah, I think you are right about "E" cup.

Such a great and funny book. Huston's film is good but doesn't quite nail it.

As his decaying brain became pickled in alcohol Hitchen's wrote another terrible essay claiming that women weren't funny (except lesbians?), ignoring O'Connor and Dorothy Parker, both of whom could out-snark him any day of the week with more acid wit than almost anyone else writing in English.

Wow, you really don't like Hitchens!

Journalism is always going to be fishwrap, although I think The Missionary Position is something of a minor classic. His literary essays were great, and represent a solid body of accomplishment.

Yeah, the film has issues with tone. I imagine the producers probably pressured to lighten up and insisted on the stupid music cues and pushing the gorilla road show story over the main stories. I met Brad Dourif once at a fan convention and we discussed the film for about 30 minutes. I think he was just happy not to be talking about the Sci-Fi channel crap he makes now. I don't think one person knew him from Cuckoo's Nest either.
I still believe Jesus is just a trick on niggras though. lol.

Haha..I just have strong opinions. I think he really became a hypocrite post-9/11 (though he was always an arrogant starfucker) but I guess that's when he became most well known. He was a great stylist but like any drunkard the drink caught up to him and his thinking and writing suffered.

His book on Orwell and Kissinger are both great and his book on the relationship between the UK/USA, Blood, Class and Empire is underrated, his most sustained and substanial writing at book length that I've read. Ironic to read in light of his 'patriotic' statements upon gaining American citizenship.

Dourif is terrific in the film, his shout of 'The Church of Christ Without Christ' is drilled into my head.

O'Connors' other novel The Violent Bear it Away isn't as funny but may be even more powerful, perverse and memorable.

Yeah, a lot of people haven't forgiven him for the turn he took after 9/11. I loved Blood, Class, and Empire, but my view of his work is probably colored by the fact that I started reading him shortly before (or after) 9/11. My opinion of Hitchens now might be less favorable if I'd started reading his work in the late eighties or early nineties. But at that time I was just starting to cut my teeth on Hunter S Thompson and Tom Wolfe, and Hitchens simply wasn't on my radar yet. Even if I'd read his work at that point in time when I started reading Thompson and Wolfe, I wouldn't have immediately grasped Hitchens' significance.

You folks speak of culture and literature at an intellectual level you would not generally associate with minds who take delight in something as low and inhumane as gagging pornography.

I think it's safe to say the only people here with half a brain are Claude, nassim and EY Davis

The rest have whole brains?

So are you saying they have outbrained you and made you irrelevent in a discussion you yourself started?

What plug in do I need for the above? I just started using firefox and it doesn't say. Just that I need a plug in. Is it a flash vid or a gif or what?

I'm on safari on my iPhone. I just use the tags [video:youtube][/video]

I believe those tags will work on chrome without any special plug in. I havnt used fire fox in years

I just needed to add the latest flash player. Working fine now. Thanks.

Sorry I couldn't be more help.... You old bastard

That was a long way to go for that punchline, huh?

You did help but I had already figured it out. Thanks again comrade. lol
Windsock- suck it!

Was this thread started because of that dispute Sam Harris and Noam Chomsky had over foreign policy?

Why would anyone listen to Harris on foreign policy? He has a BA in philosophy and a masters in some pseduo-neurology doesn't he?

It was a disagreement over absolutes and orders of magnitude. To be honest with you, as much as I like Harris, foreign policy isn't my thing. I don't know why Harris thought Chomsky would come around to his way of thinking, so I skimmed through their e-mail exchange, and haven't given it any thought since.

We're all going to die. Most probably alone, and we won't know when, where, why, or how it will happen. I have better things to do with my time

For sure.