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Notes -
Not posting in the Gaza/Israel thread since this is more generic, IMO.
In the most recent Sam Harris podcast, he elevates the problem with Hamas to the more general problem of jihadi terrorism. The episode is here and there's also a transcript here.
In this, he paints a picture of Hamas being a jihadi terrorist organization that's beyond reasoning with in terms of any reasoning we'd consider compatible with liberal western civilized order. He reads this quote from a member of a different jihadi group that had just finished slaughtering young children:
He makes the point that atheists have a lot of trouble understanding how utterly fanatical and unreasonable jihadis can be. People of Christian or Jewish faith know, because they know how powerful their own faith is in their lives. But atheists are eager to attribute this kind of proclivity towards sadism and murder as a reflection of terrible conditions that they must be living under. That people living in a utopia would never succumb to such depravity. Sam argues that Muslims of faith are just as destructive outside of Israel and disputed Israeli territories.
For more concrete stats, I found this from Google generative results
The culmination of this episode is Sam practically condemning belief in Islam entirely. Almost bordering on saying that every Palestinian is a mope in the Muslim Matrix who could become inhabited by a jihadi Agent Smith at any time. He argues that unlike Jesus, or Buddha, the central most beloved figure in Islam is Muhammed, and he was not anything like a saint:
What I hear from this is that there are no "good" Muslims, or if they are good it's an aberration, or that they're Muslim in name only.
How does one operationalize such a belief? Is Sam arguing that accepting Muslim refugees is a mistake, full stop, and that the only way to deal with jihadis is the grant them their wish: death, because there's nothing else in the world we could offer them? Is that even enough to cure the problem?
There are two billion Muslims in the world. If bringing them capitalism and the pleasures of modernity (everyone gets Starlink, Steam deck, dirt cheap halal KFC and Chil Fil-A, etc as a poster recently suggested for pacifying the Palestinians) does not innoculate against jihadi mind viruses, what would?
It took Europe about 1000 years for their culture to develop antibodies to dogmatic below-the-sanity-waterline Christian crusader ideology, and Christianity's deck was not nearly as stacked against it (its central figure was still practically a hippie). Will we have to wait this long for Islam to do the same? Sam sounds like he's advocating a form of genocide by another name.
Blasphemy. That’s how we got the christians to calm down. Certainly not by respecting their beliefs and community, or by celebrating their historical accomplishments. Islam’s stupidity and failures should be constantly rubbed in the face of its believers. Of course all muslim immigration to the west should be stopped on purely practical grounds, the insult is just a bonus.
Usually free speech can deal with those superstitions. The problem is that Islam has a built-in counter-strategy, death for apostates and critics. As sheikh qaradawi says, if not for the death penalty for apostates, Islam would not have survived to this day. This is the mechanism islamophobes need to target first, because it’s utterly poisonous to free expression. Free speech of muslims should be curtailed on that point, anyone preaching that doctrine should be deported or imprisoned. Apostates and critics should always be protected by the full force of the state, and get into a sort of witness protection program if they so desire.
Israel should bulldoze al-aqsa on live TV while ceremoniously asking Allah to do something about it. Muslims should be given the chance to reflect more often on their impotent rage and impotent god. Spurn the symbol and spare the man.
I largely agree that mockery and blasphemy are good routes to undermining any religion.
But I also think that it's easier for that project to start in places like the US that already have relatively a lot of free speech, and which export a lot of culture globally.
And the primary thing stopping that from happening here is folks on the right linking hatred and mockery of Islam with hatred and legal restrictions on Muslims. Elite thought-leaders, Hollywood content creators, and rabid social media teens are never going to get on board with the project as long as it's synonymous with right-wing shibboleths like that.
If the rhetoric switched from 'Islam sucks so all Muslims are dangerous and we shouldn't let them immigrate' to 'Islam sucks so we should let Muslims escape its grasp by coming here to learn our ways instead,' you'd still get some number of lefties complaining about that stance on social media, sure, but you'd get a lot more leeway to attack the religion on its own merits.
And you'd also recruit a lot more westernized Muslims to the cause, which would help it spread back to the homelands.
How does that work? “We can’t accept one true claim before you withdraw another claim that sounds low-status right-wing”? Why would I be bound by the confines of their self-imposed ideological prison? Like Harris, I think low-class christians, because they believe, have a much better understanding of why muslims do what they do than progressive elites.
They themselves hate, and support legal restrictions on, groups of people they dislike (“oppressors”, men, whites, right-wingers) . And unlike my dislike of muslims, which is rooted in a choice those believers made, some of the categories progressives dislike & want legally suppressed are biological.
"I won't choose to use my cultural and political influence on pursuits that will lead to outcomes I disagree with".
It's not just about those beliefs being low-status because of who currently expresses them. The political alignment between anti-Islam sentiment and anti-Muslim politics is strong enough that effectively attacking Islam will actually, consequentially, assist anti-Muslim policy proposals and cultural pundits.
You can caveat every statement you ever make on the topic with 'This is not anti-Muslim, just anti-Islam." But caveats rarely work. The average reader will not be able to completely disassociate those in your head, and will end up with stronger anti-Muslim priors after reading it. And anti-Muslim groups will quote sections of your anti-Islam arguments out of context and with no caveats in sight to support their anti-Muslim arguments.
Political narratives and alliances are real, consequential things. You decide to unilaterally ignore them for yourself, but you can't unilaterally force the rest of the world not to be influenced by them when they are interpreting and reacting to your content.
This is why we can't have nice things. Using such consequentialist logic, I can't support the woke even when they are doing and saying things I agree with. This is really the best way to polarize an open society into two groups who hate each other and will support their team whether they are right or wrong.
I don't think wokes are the only people who choose their political rhetoric based on consequentialist aims.
Just for example, I think the average use of the word 'woke' by a politician or pundit on the right is aimed at a consequentialist goal (rallying the base, pushing a narrative) rather than it being a meaningful term used carefully and precisely to optimal describe a situation.
People get involved with industries that are trying to change the world because they care about the state of the world. This is true on all sides of every issue.
Asking people who care about the state of the world and want to change it, to not be consequentialist when considering their rhetoric and actions, is sort of definitionally a losing fight.
This is false. The group in question objects to this word, has object to all the other words in the past, and will object to all future words that refer to them and have caught on, because they do not wish to be identified by outsiders.
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They have to call them something. I can offer ‘progressives’, or ‘PC left’(that one aptly suggests the outsized importance they place on ‘political rhetoric’), or any other term that’s sufficiently neutral. The negative valence opponents assign to whatever term they use is unavoidable, simply a function of their alignment.
To be clear, strictly speaking I am a consequentialist myself, I just don’t think their calculation of consequences is correct. “Your policy results in two groups incapable of finding the truth, who hate each other and cannot compromise” is consequentialist reasoning.
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I understand OP's point to be that legal restrictions on Muslims would be seen as objectionable by those people because they would consider is unjust, not as low status. Opposing invidious discrimination against despised minority groups is, after all, a pretty common sentiment among the people in question.
Then the fairness of that policy should be debated separately, not abandoned as a preemptive concession before they agree that the truth is in fact the truth on some other point("get on board with the project"). The "rhetoric" is the problem, you see, not the fact that it's wrong. His use of “linked to” and “right-wing shibboleths” strongly suggest a status/ideological purity motive. He doesn’t want to be “linked to” “right-wing shibboleths”. I mean, who are we kidding here? If even I feel the need to avoid giving off low-status right wing vibes, they assuredly experience a much stronger pull.
OP did not say that they don't want to be linked to right-wing shibboleths. Rather, OP said that potential allies of the project are not going to "get on board" if it is framed in a way which is offensive to their core beliefs, and is instead framed in a way (helping people escape a place where they are subjected to an oppressive ideology) that is instead consistent with those values.
Your suggested strategy (debating the fairness of "hatred and legal restrictions on Muslims") amounts to a suggestion that the way to achieve the goal is to get people to change their basic principles. That is a fool's game, especially when the principles in question (freedom of religion and nondiscrimination) are very much mainstream.
With an attitude like that, societies could never change and correct their mistakes, comrade. Anyway, I’m suspicious of the strategic advice coming from political opponents. Let's just debate the ideas and let me worry about what people will accept.
No one said that has to be the only strategy. There can be short-term and long-term strategies (and if you mean that society should correct its "mistakes" of valuing freedom of religion and freedom from insidious discrimination, that is long-term indeed).
Finally, I don't know what you hope to gain by addressing me as "comrade."
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No, it isn't.
...Haven't you repeatedly argued with me that Free Speech Maximalism is one of your core values, and that I'm wrong when I argue that almost all people aren't actually free-speech maximalist but rather want as much free speech as possible so long as the speech isn't too objectionable? Because this sure looks an awful lot like "speech should be free as long as it's not too awful." I guess my point is that we are in agreement here, but that your previous statements indicate that this should be surprising to you.
It seems to me that your logic comes from a place where you assume the other side isn't going to actually be able to execute what they see as the righteous vengeance of God. That's not an assumption I would want to make a habit of relying on.
What I object to is your argument that just because there are limits to free speech, free speech is a meaningless concept no one really believes in. Your "speech should be free as long as it's not too awful" erases all distinction. If someone argued that all christian or non-christian books should be banned, how would you describe him? “I guess he’s just like everyone else, he doesn’t really believe in free speech” ? I’m not religiously committed to 'absolute free speech', or to classical liberal ideas in general for that matter, I just think they work in almost all cases, and I explained why they don’t here.
I don’t think they could hate jews any more than they already do. Their tremendous animosity has failed to bring about the downfall of the enemies of god so far. The schock between islam’s secular powerlessness and its religious claim of omnipotence is the entire point.
That's because there very obviously is no distinction. There is no objective measure of any of the terms involved in this discussion: "harm", "severity", "threat", "balance" etc and so on. You can call me a postmodernist again if it makes you feel better, but that doesn't change the fact that if someone disagrees with your definition of a word, there's piss-all you can do about it. And the distinction, if you're keeping track, is that actual postmodernists think the language games are all there is, whereas I think that there is a bedrock truth readily available to all men, but understand that I cannot force another to recognize that truth against his will any more than he can force me, because communication is not deterministic. And if we cannot reconcile, what is there left to do but fight?
You cite Islamic calls for attacks on blasphemers as a clear case where speech should be constrained, but I say there's zero need to restrict such speech in any way. Why not respond that such calls are entirely permitted, and if anyone tries to act on them within our communities we will simply shoot them to death on the spot. It worked in Texas, when a pair of heavily-armed Jihadis (escorted by FBI agents, naturally) rolled up to a Mohammed cartoon contest and managed to lightly wound one person before having their limbs unstrung.
I don't think you've actually demonstrated a need to restrict speech, because there never is a need to restrict speech, only a want. And it's okay to want things, and to be honest about the fact that we want them. You can, in this moment, cease from framing your desires and values as some sort of universal imperative, and admit that you want to do a thing because you think it should be done.
I'd describe him as "an enemy", but from the outside view, sure. An example would be the Japanese when they extirpated the Christian faith from their nation in the 1600s. Nothing they did was special or unusual. They perceived a threat, and acted on it. That's what people do. The trick comes in figuring out whether something is or isn't a threat, and finding alternatives to conflict with the former, or winning the conflict with the latter.
It is, in fact, relative. There are people I would prefer to treat as the Japanese treated Christians. My problem with the Japanese is not, to a first approximation, that they used the power of the state against those they saw as a threat to their society. It's how they defined "threat to society".
The vast majority of people want free speech and something at least approximating liberal ideals in "almost all cases". No one suppresses speech they like and consider wholesome. It's the dangerous speech that needs protecting, or none at all. Your "almost all cases" doesn't cover a broad swath of topics of immediate importance to a large percentage of the earth's population. And if you think you're free to "explain why they don't" here, why am I not free to "explain why they don't" somewhere else?
From previous discussions, it seems clear that you understand that we don't actually disagree much on the object level. The disagreement is that you claim to defend speech, but I don't trust your defense to protect me when I need it, because the principles you are basing it on have observably failed to protect me when I needed it. My stance, on the other hand, is an attempt to not imply promises of protection that I won't actually be willing to live up to. "Free Speech" with an invisible asterisk applied is a moral hazard. Better to forego the asterisk and simply be straightforward about what we're actually willing to commit to.
"I don't think they can hate [X] more than they already do" is a poor bet when it comes to humans. Hate is fractal. There is no bottom.
So far.
By my reckoning, Islamic Terror won the War on Terror hands-down. I think they're doing pretty okay.
I’m not in principle opposed to a scuffle, but a failure to communicate on a failure of communication seems like a flimsy reason. How about we just stumble home like two deaf-mute assholes ?
What are you even trying to achieve with all this? If you prove your thesis to my satisfaction, you will have proven that communication works, and the paradox monster will eat us both.
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I think the problem with “just wait until they actually do it” is that it essentially requires an omniscient government. The level of spying on civilians needed to know if I’m going to commit any crime is pretty high.
I would regulate calls for jihad much like I’d regulate any other exhortation to commit a crime. We don’t allow someone to advocate for breaking the law. I can’t get on Twitter and call for the death of a celebrity you’re mad at. Likewise calling for the bombing of buildings, death of groups of people, and other criminal activities should be illegal.
...Or a heavily-armed populace, which we have.
Others have noted that the speech you think should be illegal is not, in fact, illegal.
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I don't think you're correct. My understanding is that only speech which advocates imminent lawless action is illegal in the United States. You can absolutely advocate for genocide, say that a celebrity should be executed, and that someone should bomb this particular building, and no one will arrest you.
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Absent a real threat of imminent lawless action, all the examples of obviously-banworthy speech you mention are (at least in the US) protected by the 1st amendment. So in the US, regulating calls for jihad much like other exhortations to commit a crime means not regulating it at all, except in the rare case for a call for jihad against X where X is sufficiently specific to meet the imminent lawless action standard.
Looking at politics rather than law, whether vague or remote exhortations to commit a crime should be default-banned (the "stochastic terrorism" theory) or default-legal (the US status quo) is pretty much at the edge of the Overton window on free speech. Add culture war toxicity, and it isn't surprising that this topic generates a lot of heat and not much light.
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