Sam Harris explains why he believes it's Noam Chomsky's fault that "the left" is too hard on Dick Cheney

Too hard on Dick Cheney? A man who should be prosecuted for war crimes.

Listen if you can, wanted to tell him he was a total dick after a very short time.

WTF
too hard or a war criminal !!!!!

Sam Harris Proves once and for all he is nothing but a stooge for hate promoting RW, his true economic agenda of self enrichment through the suffering of a 'foreigner' typical RW propagandist. he has with out a doubt turned Atheism from a Philosophy into a institution trying to catch the hate filled nutjobs that fall through the cracks of evangelism (where hate filled westerns normally end up).

Sam harri is 100% spot on about Noam.

Total bullshit, the left makes no moral equivalency between the al Baghdadis of the world and the Dick Cheneys of the world. Harris is making Cheney out to be somebody who was trying to stop evil -- he wasn't. He didn't care about stopping any bad people; he's a sociopath who seized upon an excuse to grab power and wealth (a flimsy excuse that only convinced idiots), and he simply didn't care who died in the process.

I think this says it all:

"There clearly was a relationship. It's been testified to. The evidence is overwhelming. It goes back to the early '90s. It involves a whole series of contacts, high-level contacts with Osama bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence officials." -- Cheney in 2004

“On the question of whether or not Iraq was involved in 9/11, there was never any evidence to prove that.” -- Cheney just five years later

So on a matter like the reason for invading Iraq, Cheney went from "the evidence is overwhelming" to "there was never any evidence" in five years.

That's sociopath behavior; the only way you can be like that is if you really don't give a damn what the truth is. Cheney is not like the people who accidentally killed civilians while trying to stop the Nazis. He's more like the guy who runs over pedestrians while driving away from a bank robbery.

^Ben........nail on head. great post

Cass wrote:^Ben........nail on head. great post

Brasidas wrote:

Sam harri is 100% spot on about Noam.

Fucking bullshit he is..

Sam Harris is a demented fuckwit arsehole scumbag Fascist pig..

And a total waste of space oxygen thief neo-nazi lowlife, apparently funded by the usual exploitive RW loony toons ?    

Love to hear his defense of Hitler.

Ben_Reilly wrote:Total bullshit, the left makes no moral equivalency between the al Baghdadis of the world and the Dick Cheneys of the world. Harris is making Cheney out to be somebody who was trying to stop evil -- he wasn't. He didn't care about stopping any bad people; he's a sociopath who seized upon an excuse to grab power and wealth (a flimsy excuse that only convinced idiots), and he simply didn't care who died in the process.

I think this says it all:

"There clearly was a relationship. It's been testified to. The evidence is overwhelming. It goes back to the early '90s. It involves a whole series of contacts, high-level contacts with Osama bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence officials." -- Cheney in 2004

“On the question of whether or not Iraq was involved in 9/11, there was never any evidence to prove that.” -- Cheney just five years later

So on a matter like the reason for invading Iraq, Cheney went from "the evidence is overwhelming" to "there was never any evidence" in five years.

That's sociopath behavior; the only way you can be like that is if you really don't give a damn what the truth is. Cheney is not like the people who accidentally killed civilians while trying to stop the Nazis. He's more like the guy who runs over pedestrians while driving away from a bank robbery.

Not a single one of you listened to the video clip did you?
Not one of you actually addressed his point on moral equivalence of thew attackers and their intent.
Here it is for you clueless lefties to understand:

“even if Noam Chomsky were right about everything, the Islamic doctrines related to martyrdom, jihad, blasphemy, apostasy, the rights of women and homosexuals, etc. would still present huge problems for the emergence of a global civil society (and these are problems quite unlike those presented by similar tenets in other faiths, for reasons that I have explained at length elsewhere and touch on only briefly here). And any way in which I might be biased or blinded by “the religion of the state,” or any other form of cultural indoctrination, has absolutely no relevance to the plight of Shiites who have their mosques, weddings, and funerals bombed by Sunni extremists, or to victims of rape who are beaten, imprisoned, or even killed as “adulteresses” throughout the Muslim world. I hope it goes without saying that the Afghan girls who even now are risking their lives by merely learning to read would not be best compensated for their struggles by being handed copies of Chomsky’s books enumerating the sins of the West”

That shows not one of you understand moral equivalence.

Is it really true that the sins for which I hold Islam accountable are “committed at least to an equal extent by many other groups, especially [my] own”? First, I have to say that so much moral confusion lies buried in this statement that it would take a very long essay to respond to all the charges implicit in it. What Greenwald surely means to convey is that the U.S. government is (in some sense that is not merely absurd) the worst terrorist organization on earth. I have argued against this general idea in many places, especially in my first book, The End of Faith, and I won’t repeat that argument here. I will say, however, that nothing about honestly discussing the doctrine of Islam requires that a person not notice all that might be wrong with U.S. foreign policy, capitalism, the vestiges of empire, or anything else that may be contributing to our ongoing conflicts in the Muslim world. Which is to say that even if Noam Chomsky were right about everything, the Islamic doctrines related to martyrdom, jihad, blasphemy, apostasy, the rights of women and homosexuals, etc. would still present huge problems for the emergence of a global civil society (and these are problems quite unlike those presented by similar tenets in other faiths, for reasons that I have explained at length elsewhere and touch on only briefly here). And any way in which I might be biased or blinded by “the religion of the state,” or any other form of cultural indoctrination, has absolutely no relevance to the plight of Shiites who have their mosques, weddings, and funerals bombed by Sunni extremists, or to victims of rape who are beaten, imprisoned, or even killed as “adulteresses” throughout the Muslim world. I hope it goes without saying that the Afghan girls who even now are risking their lives by merely learning to read would not be best compensated for their struggles by being handed copies of Chomsky’s books enumerating the sins of the West.
Western conflict with the Muslim world has arisen, off and on, for centuries. Thomas Jefferson sued for peace with the Barbary Pirates who had enslaved something like 1.5 million Europeans and Americans between 16th and 18th centuries. As Christopher Hitchens once pointed out, the explicit justification for this piracy was the doctrine of Islam. In fact, this collision with Islam helped ensure the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, for it was argued that only a federation of states with a strong navy could stand against such a persistent threat. Consequently, one could argue that the American war on terror formally began in 1801 with the Barbary Wars—waged by the Jefferson and Madison administrations. This is one of the many ways to see that our troubles in the Muslim world are not purely a matter of our lust for oil, our support for dictators, or any aspect of U.S. foreign policy. As the much-maligned Samuel Huntington one said, “Islam has bloody borders.” It always has. But many people seem determined to deny this.
Is it true, as Greenwald insists, that the religiously inspired affronts to reason and civility that I criticize among Muslims are “committed at least to an equal extent by many other groups”?
Let’s take a trip to the real world. Consider: Anyone who wants to draw a cartoon, write a novel, or stage a Broadway play that denigrates Mormonism is free to do it. In the United States, this freedom is ostensibly guaranteed by the First Amendment—but that is not, in fact, what guarantees it. The freedom to poke fun at Mormonism is guaranteed by the fact that Mormons do not dispatch assassins to silence their critics or summon murderous hordes in response to satire. As I have pointed out before, when The Book of Mormon became the most celebrated musical of the year, the LDS Church protested by placing ads for the faith in Playbill. A wasted effort, perhaps: but this was a genuinely charming sign of good humor, given the alternatives. What are the alternatives? Can any reader of this page imagine the staging of a similar play about Islam in the United States, or anywhere else? No you cannot—unless you also imagine the creators of this play being hunted for the rest of their lives by religious maniacs. Yes, there are crazy people in every faith—and I often hear from them. But what is true of Mormonism is true of every other faith, with a single exception.  At this moment in history, there is only one religion that systematically stifles free expression with credible threats of violence. The truth is, we have already lost our First Amendment rights with respect to Islam—and because they brand any observation of this fact a symptom of Islamophobia, Muslim apologists like Greenwald are largely to blame.
It is depressing to quote from one’s own work, but it is even more depressing to struggle to find new ways to say something that shouldn’t have needed saying in the first place. Here is how I put it in the immediate aftermath of the Innocence of Muslims debacle, in an article entitled “On the Freedom to Offend an Imaginary God”:

Consider what is actually happening: Some percentage of the world’s Muslims—Five percent? Fifteen? Fifty? It’s not yet clear—are demanding that all non-Muslims conform to the strictures of Islamic law. And where they do not immediately resort to violence in their protests, they threaten it. Carrying a sign that reads “Behead Those Who Insult the Prophet” may still count as an example of peaceful protest, but it is also an assurance that infidel blood would be shed if the imbecile holding the placard only had more power. This grotesque promise is, of course, fulfilled in nearly every Muslim society. To make a film like Innocence of Muslims anywhere in the Middle East would be as sure a method of suicide as the laws of physics allow.
What exactly was in the film? Who made it? What were their motives? Was Muhammad really depicted? Was that a Qur’an burning, or some other book? Questions of this kind are obscene. Here is where the line must be drawn and defended without apology: We are free to burn the Qur’an or any other book, and to criticize Muhammad or any other human being. Let no one forget it.
At moments like this, we inevitably hear—from people who don’t know what it’s like to believe in paradise—that religion is just a way of channeling popular unrest. The true source of the problem can be found in the history of Western aggression in the region. It is our policies, rather than our freedoms, that they hate. I believe that the future of liberalism—and much else—depends on our overcoming this ruinous self-deception.  Religion only works as a pretext for political violence because many millions of people actually believe what they say they believe: that imaginary crimes like blasphemy and apostasy are killing offenses.

I stand by these words and by everything else I have said or written about Islam. And I maintain that anyone who considers my views to be a symptom of irrational fear is ignorant, dishonest, or insane. (I recently suggested to Greenwald on Twitter that we settle our dispute by holding simultaneous cartoon contests. He could use his Guardian blog to solicit cartoons about Islam, and I’d use my website to run a similar contest for any other faith on earth. As will come as no surprise, the man immediately started sputtering non-sequiturs.)

For several years now, whenever I have drawn a link between Islam and violence—especially the tactic of suicide bombing—my critics have urged me to consult the work of Robert A. Pape. Pape is the author of a very influential paper, “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” (American Political Science Review 97, no. 3, 2003), and a subsequent book, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, in which he argues that suicidal terrorism is best understood as a strategic means to achieve certain well-defined nationalist goals and should not be considered a consequence of religious ideology. In March of 2012, Pape agreed to debate these issues with me on my blog. I announced our debate publicly and sent him my first volley by email. Then he disappeared. I have no idea what happened.
I would have made it clear to Pape that I have never argued (and would never argue) that all conflicts are attributable to religion or that all suicide bombing is the product of Islam. I am well aware, for instance, that the Tamil Tigers were avowedly secular. Even in this case, however, it seems only decent to recall that they learned the tactic of suicide bombing from Hezbollah and eventually developed their own quasi-religious cult of martyr worship. One can’t really argue that they were a group of classically rational actors. And even here, in this most secular of cases, always used to exculpate Islam, we find the divisive role of religion—because it seems unreasonable to believe that a civil war would have erupted in Sri Lanka if the Tamils, who are nominal Hindus, had been Sinhalese Buddhists, like the government they were fighting. Again, nothing turns on this point, because I admit that not all terrorism need be religiously inspired. 
The general blindness of secular academics to the religious roots of Muslim violence is easily explained. As my friend Jerry Coyne once observed, when confronted with a transparently religious motive (e.g. “I will blow myself up to get into paradise”), secular scholars refuse to take it at face value; they always look for the “deeper” reasons—economic, political, or personal—behind it. However, when given economic, political, or personal motives (e.g. “I did it because they stole my family’s land, and I felt totally hopeless.”), these researchers always seem to take a person at his word. They never dig for the religious motive behind apparently terrestrial concerns. The game is rigged. This is how an anthropologist like Scott Atran can interview dozens of jihadists—each of whom rattles on about God and paradise—and come out thinking that the doctrine of Islam has nothing to do with terrorism.
To describe the principal aims of a group like al Qaeda as “nationalistic,” as Pape does, is simply ludicrous. Al Qaeda’s goal is the establishment of a global caliphate. And even in those cases where a jihadist like Osama bin Laden seemed to voice concern about the fate of a nation, his grievances with its “occupiers” were primarily theological. Osama bin Laden objected to the presence of infidels in proximity to the holy sites on the Arabian Peninsula. And we were not “occupiers” of Saudi Arabia, in any case. We were there by the permission of the Saudi regime—a regime that bin Laden considered insufficiently Islamic. To say that members of al Qaeda have perpetrated terrorist atrocities against U.S. interests and innocent Muslims because of a “nationalistic” agenda is to just play a game with words.
Pape’s narrow focus on suicide terrorism also allows him to ignore all the other barbarism in the Muslim world that has its origins in religion. Was the fatwa against Salman Rushdie the result of foreign occupation? The Danish cartoon controversy? The calls for blood over a poorly named teddy bear? The movement to hang atheist bloggers in Bangladesh? What about the internecine murders of apostates in Pakistan (accomplished, all too often, by suicide bombers)? The ubiquitous abuse of women? Are these problems also the result of western occupation? How do the perpetrators of these crimes explain their own behavior? It is always by reference to their most sacred concern: Islam.
Many peoples have been conquered by foreign powers or otherwise mistreated and show no propensity for the type of violence that is commonplace among Muslims. Where are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers? The Tibetans have suffered an occupation every bit as oppressive as any ever imposed on a Muslim country. At least one million Tibetans have died as a result, and their culture has been systematically eradicated. Even their language has been taken from them. Recently, they have begun to practice self-immolation in protest. The difference between self-immolation and blowing oneself up in a crowd of children, or at the entrance to a hospital, is impossible to overstate, and reveals a great difference in moral attitude between Vajrayana Buddhism and Islam. This is not to say that Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers couldn’t exist. Tibetans, generally speaking, are not pacifists—nor are most Buddhists elsewhere. In fact, during WWII, the Japanese Kamikaze pilots were influenced by the doctrine of Zen Buddhism. But there are important differences between Zen and Vajrayana that seem relevant here. Vajrayana emphasizes compassion in a way that Zen does not, and Zen generally maintains a more martial and more paradoxical view of ethics.
My point, of course, is that beliefs matter. And it is not an accident that so many Muslims believe that jihad and martyrdom are the highest callings in human life, while many Tibetans believe that compassion and self-transcendence are. This is what Islam and Vajrayana Buddhism, respectively, teach.
Am I saying that Islam is the worst religion across the board? No. Again, one must always focus on the specific consequences of specific ideas. There is, for instance, no reason to mention Islam when criticizing religious opposition to embryonic stem-cell research, because the doctrine allows for it. This is not owing to some biological or ethical insight on the part of Muhammad, obviously. It is simply a happy accident that at least one hadith suggests that the human soul enters the embryo many weeks after conception (either at day 40, 80, or 120, depending on how one interprets it). It would be preposterous and unfair to equate Islam with Christianity when discussing religious impediments to this form of research.
Finally, as I regularly emphasize when discussing Islam, no one is suffering under its doctrine more than Muslims themselves: Muslim jihadists primarily kill other Muslims. And the laws against apostasy, blasphemy, idolatry, and other forms of peaceful expression diminish the freedoms of Muslims far more than those of non-Muslims living in the West. Liberals like Greenwald, who are so eager to swing the flail of Islamophobia, display a sickening insensitivity to the plight of women, homosexuals, and freethinkers throughout the Muslim world. At this moment, millions of women and girls have been abandoned to illiteracy, compulsory marriage, and lives of slavery and abuse under the guise of “multiculturalism” and “religious sensitivity.” And the most liberal Muslim minds are forced into hiding. The best way to address this problem is by no means obvious. But lying about its cause, and defaming those who speak honestly in defense of a global civil society, seems a very unlikely path to a solution.
For further discussion of the “Islamophobia” canard, see my exchange with Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Lifting the Veil of “Islamophobia”

My position on profiling for the purpose of airline security (link to here)
I once wrote a short essay about airline security that provoked a ferocious backlash from readers. In publishing this piece, I’m afraid that I broke one of my cardinal rules of time (and sanity) management: Not everything worth saying is worth saying oneself. I learned this the hard way once before, in discussing the ethics of torture and collateral damage (see below), but this time the backlash was even more unpleasant and less rational.
One line in my article raised a tsunami of contempt for me in liberal and secular circles:

We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it.

Of course, many of my detractors (like Greenwald) have used this quotation in ways calculated to make readers believe that I want dark-skinned people singled out—and not just in our airports, but everywhere. What my critics always neglect to say, however, is that in the article in which that sentence appears, I explicitly include white, middle-aged men like me in the profile (twice). This still leaves many millions of travelers outside the profile. My point is that we should be giving less scrutiny to people who obviously aren’t jihadists. Whatever the practical constraints are on implementing such a policy, I remain willing to bet my life that the woman in the photo below is not a suicide bomber. Which is, of course, to say that the TSA employee who appears to be searching her body for explosives is not only inconveniencing the woman herself, along with everyone in line behind her, but putting people’s lives in jeopardy by squandering her limited attentional resources.


To assert that ethnicity, gender, age, nationality, dress, traveling companions, behavior in the terminal, and other outward appearances offer no indication of a person’s beliefs or terrorist potential is either quite crazy or totally dishonest. We are paying a very high price for this obscurantism—and the price could grow much higher in an instant. We have limited resources, and every moment spent searching a woman like the one pictured above, or the children seen in the videos I linked to in my original article, is a moment in which someone or something else goes unobserved. Suicidal terrorism is overwhelmingly a Muslim phenomenon. If you grant this, it follows that applying equal scrutiny to Mennonites is a dangerous waste of time.
In the hope of achieving some clarity on the issue of profiling, I let the anti-profiling security expert Bruce Schneier write a guest post on my blog. I then engaged in a long and rather tedious debate with him. It seems that few minds were changed, including my own. I heard from many readers who took my side in the debate—among them some who have worked in airport security, U.S. Customs, the FBI, Delta Force, fraud detection, and other areas where real-time threat assessments must be made. I also received unequivocal support from Saudis, Pakistanis, Indians, Egyptians, and others who are regularly profiled. However, I heard as well from many people who thought that Schneier mopped the floor with me. Some of these readers continue to wonder why I, being ostensibly committed to reason, haven’t publicly conceded defeat and changed my view.
There seems to be a consensus, even among my critics, that no one does airline security better than the Israelis (Schneier himself admits this). But, as I pointed out, and Schneier agreed, the Israelis profile in every sense of the term—racially, ethnically, behaviorally, by nationality and religion, etc. In the end, Schneier’s argument came down to a claim about limited resources: He argued that we are too poor (and, perhaps, too stupid) to effectively copy the Israeli approach. That may be true. But pleading poverty and ineptitude is very different from proving that profiling doesn’t work, or that it is unethical, or that the link between the tenets of Islam and jihadist violence isn’t causal.
Schneier’s opposition to profiling had almost nothing to do with the reasons that many people find it controversial. But none of my critics seemed to notice this. Nor did they notice when Schneier conceded that the most secure system would use a combination of profiling and randomness. He simply argued that profiling for the purpose of airline security is too expensive and impractical. But I was not vilified because I advocated something expensive and impractical. I was vilified because my critics believe that I support a policy that is shockingly unethical, well known to be ineffective, and the product of near-total confusion about the causes of terrorism.
My position on profiling is very simple: We should admit that we know what we are looking for (suicidal terrorists) and that certain people obviously require less scrutiny than others. We should scan everyone’s luggage, of course, because bombs can be placed there without a person’s knowledge. But given scarce resources, we can’t afford to waste our time and attention pretending to think that every traveller is equally likely to be affiliated with al Qaeda.

My position on preemptive nuclear war (link to here)
The journalist Chris Hedges has repeatedly claimed (in print, in public lectures, on the radio, and on television) that I advocate a nuclear first-strike against the Muslim world. His remarks, which have been recycled continually in interviews and blog posts, generally take the following form:
I mean, Sam Harris, at the end of his first book, asks us to consider a nuclear first strike on the Arab world.
(Q&A at Harvard Divinity School, March 20, 2008)
Harris, echoing the blood lust of Hitchens, calls, in his book The End of Faith, for a nuclear first strike against the Islamic world.
(The Dangerous Atheism of Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, Alternet, March 22, 2008)
And you have in Sam Harris’ book, “The End of Faith,” a call for us to consider a nuclear first strike against the Arab world. This isn’t rational. This is insane.
(The Tavis Smiley Show, April 15, 2008)
Sam Harris, in his book The End of Faith, asks us to consider carrying out a nuclear first-strike on the Arab world. That’s not a rational option—that’s insanity.
(A Conversation with Chris Hedges, Free Inquiry, August/September 2008)
Wherever they appear, Hedges’s comments leave the impression that I want the U.S. government to start killing Muslims by the tens of millions. Below I present the only passage I have ever written on the subject of preventive nuclear war and the only passage that Hedges could be referring to in my work (The End of Faith, pp. 128-129). I have taken the liberty of emphasizing some of the words that Hedges chose to ignore:

It should be of particular concern to us that the beliefs of Muslims pose a special problem for nuclear deterrence. There is little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons. A cold war requires that the parties be mutually deterred by the threat of death. Notions of martyrdom and jihad run roughshod over the logic that allowed the United States and the Soviet Union to pass half a century perched, more or less stably, on the brink of Armageddon. What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry? If history is any guide, we will not be sure about where the offending warheads are or what their state of readiness is, and so we will be unable to rely on targeted, conventional weapons to destroy them. In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe. How would such an unconscionable act of self-defense be perceived by the rest of the Muslim world? It would likely be seen as the first incursion of a genocidal crusade. The horrible irony here is that seeing could make it so: this very perception could plunge us into a state of hot war with any Muslim state that had the capacity to pose a nuclear threat of its own. All of this is perfectly insane, of course: I have just described a plausible scenario in which much of the world’s population could be annihilated on account of religious ideas that belong on the same shelf with Batman, the philosopher’s stone, and unicorns. That it would be a horrible absurdity for so many of us to die for the sake of myth does not mean, however, that it could not happen. Indeed, given the immunity to all reasonable intrusions that faith enjoys in our discourse, a catastrophe of this sort seems increasingly likely. We must come to terms with the possibility that men who are every bit as zealous to die as the nineteen hijackers may one day get their hands on long-range nuclear weaponry. The Muslim world in particular must anticipate this possibility and find some way to prevent it. Given the steady proliferation of technology, it is safe to say that time is not on our side.

Clearly, I was describing a case in which a hostile regime that is avowedly suicidal acquires long-range nuclear weaponry (i.e. they can hit distant targets like Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles, etc.). Of course, not every Muslim regime would fit this description. For instance, Pakistan already has nuclear weapons, but they have yet to develop long-range rockets, and there is every reason to believe that the people currently in control of these bombs are more pragmatic and less certain of paradise than the Taliban are. The same could be said of Iran, if it acquires nuclear weapons in the near term (though not, perhaps, from the perspective of Israel, for whom any Iranian bomb will pose an existential threat). But the civilized world (including all the pragmatic Muslims living within it) must finally come to terms with what the ideology of groups like the Taliban, al Qaeda, ISIS, etc. means—because it destroys the logic of deterrence. There are a significant number of people in the Muslim world for whom the slogan “We love death more than the infidel loves life” appears to be an honest statement of psychological fact, and we must do everything in our power to prevent them from getting long-range nuclear weapons.
It would seem relevant in this context to note that Chris Hedges has since been exposed as a serial plagiarist and liar—a revelation that I find utterly unsurprising. The truth, however, is that I have met worse than Hedges: There was the repellent John Gorenfeld, who interviewed me over the phone (on December 19, 2006) for the website Alternet. I did not respond publicly to the resulting article, because it was so poorly written that I couldn’t imagine anyone taking it seriously. However, it appears to have struck some unsuspecting readers as an honest discussion of my views. So I will simply note my objection to it here. Gorenfeld seriously distorted my positions on two controversial topics—judicial torture and the paranormal—both of which are clarified below.

My position on torture (link to here)
In The End of Faith, I argue that competing religious doctrines have divided our world into separate moral communities and that these divisions have become a continual source of human violence.  My purpose in writing the book was to offer a way of thinking about our world that would render certain forms of conflict quite literally unthinkable.
In one section of the book (pp. 192−199), I briefly discuss the ethics of torture and collateral damage in times of war, arguing that collateral damage is worse than torture across the board. Rather than appreciate just how bad I think collateral damage is in ethical terms, some readers have mistakenly concluded that I take a cavalier attitude toward the practice of torture. I do not. Nevertheless, there are extreme circumstances in which I believe that practices like “water-boarding” may be not only ethically justifiable, but ethically necessary.  This is not the same as saying that they should be legal (Crimes such as trespassing and theft may sometimes be ethically necessary, though everyone has an interest in keeping them illegal).
I am not alone in thinking that there are potential circumstances in which the use of torture would be ethically justifiable. The liberal Senator Charles Schumer has publicly stated that most U.S. senators would support torture to find out the location of a ticking time bomb. Such scenarios have been widely criticized as unrealistic. But realism is not the point of these thought experiments. The point is that unless your argument rules out torture in idealized cases, you don’t have a categorical argument against torture. As nuclear and biological terrorism become increasingly possible, it is in everyone’s interest for men and women of goodwill to determine what should be done if a person appears to have operational knowledge of an imminent atrocity (and may even claim to possess such knowledge), but won’t otherwise talk about it.
My argument for the limited use of coercive interrogation (“torture” by another name) is essentially this: If you think it is ever justifiable to drop bombs in an attempt to kill a man like Osama bin Laden (and thereby risk killing and maiming innocent men, women, and children), you should think it may sometimes be justifiable to water-board a man like Osama bin Laden (and risk abusing someone who just happens to look like him). It seems to me that however one compares the practices of water-boarding high-level terrorists and dropping bombs, dropping bombs always comes out looking worse in ethical terms.  And yet, most people tacitly accept the practice of modern warfare while considering it taboo to even speak about the possibility of practicing torture. It is important to point out that my argument for the restricted use of torture does not make a travesty like Abu Ghraib look any less sadistic or stupid.  I consider our mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib to be patently unethical.  I also think it was one of the most damaging blunders in the last century of U.S. foreign policy. Nor have I ever seen the wisdom or necessity of denying proper legal counsel (and access to evidence) to prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay. Indeed, I consider much of what occurred under Bush and Cheney—the routine abuse of ordinary prisoners, the practice of “extraordinary rendition,” etc.—to be a terrible stain upon our nation.
Some people believe that while collateral damage may be worse than torture, they are independent evils, and one problem sheds no light upon the other. However, they are not independent in principle. In fact, it is easy to see how information gained through torture might mitigate the risk of collateral damage. If one found oneself with an apparent choice between torturing a known terrorist and bombing civilians, torturing the terrorist should seem like the more ethical option. But most people’s intuitions seem to run the other way. In fact, very few critics of my collateral-damage argument even acknowledge how strangely asymmetrical our worries about torture and collateral damage are. A conversation about the ethics of torture can scarcely be had, and yet collateral damage is often reported in the context of a “successful” military operation as though it posed no ethical problem whatsoever. The case of Baitullah Mehsud, killed along with 12 others (including his wife and mother-in-law), is a perfect example: Had his wife been water-boarded in order to obtain the relevant intelligence, rather than merely annihilated by a missile, we can be sure that torrents of outrage would have ensued.
It seems, in fact, that many people do not understand what the phrase “collateral damage” signifies, and thus they imagine that I have drawn a false analogy. Most assume that my analogy fails because torture is the intentional infliction of guaranteed suffering, whereas collateral damage is the unintentional imposition of possible suffering (or death). Apples and oranges.
But this isn’t true. We often drop bombs knowing that innocent people will be killed or horribly injured by them. We target buildings in which combatants are hiding, knowing that noncombatants are also in those buildings, or standing too close to escape destruction. And when innocent people are killed or injured—when children are burned over most of their bodies and live to suffer interminable pain and horrible disfigurement—our leaders accept this as the cost of doing business in a time of war. Many people oppose specific wars, of course—such as the war in Iraq—but no public figure has been vilified for accepting collateral damage in a war that is deemed just. And yet, anyone who would defend the water-boarding of a terrorist like Khalid Sheikh Muhammad will reap a whirlwind of public criticism. This makes no moral sense.
Again, which is worse: water-boarding a terrorist or killing/maiming him? Which is worse, water-boarding an innocent person or killing/maiming him?  There are journalists who have volunteered to be water-boarded. Where are the journalists who have volunteered to have a 5000-pound bomb dropped on their homes with their families inside?

It is widely claimed that torture “does not work”—that it produces unreliable information, implicates innocent people, etc. As I argue in The End of Faith, this line of defense does not resolve the underlying ethical dilemma. The claim that torture never works, or that it always produces bad information, is incredible (and well known to be false). There are cases in which the mere threat of torture has worked. One can easily imagine situations in which even a very low probability of getting useful information through torture would seem to justify it—the looming threat of nuclear terrorism being the most obvious case. It is decidedly unhelpful that those who claim to know that torture is “always wrong” never seem to envision the circumstances in which good people would be tempted to use it. Critics of my collateral-damage argument always ignore the hard case: when the person in custody is known to have been involved in terrible acts of violence and when the threat of further atrocities is imminent. If you think such situations never arise, consider what it might be like to capture a high-ranking member of al Qaeda along with several accomplices and their computers. The possibility that such a person might really be “innocent” or that he could “just say anything” to mislead his interrogators begins to seem less of a concern. Such captures bring us closer to a “ticking-bomb” scenario than many people are willing to admit.
Although I think that torture should remain illegal, it is not clear that having a torture provision in our laws would create as slippery a slope as many people imagine.  We have a capital punishment provision, but it has not led to our killing prisoners at random because we can’t control ourselves.  While I am strongly opposed to capital punishment, I can readily concede that our executing about five people every month hasn’t led to total moral chaos.  Perhaps a rule regarding torture could be applied with equal restraint.
It seems probable, however, that any legal use of torture would have unacceptable consequences. In light of this concern, the best strategy I have heard comes from Mark Bowden in his Atlantic Monthly article “The Dark Art of Interrogation.” Bowden recommends that we keep torture illegal and maintain a policy of not torturing anybody for any reason—but our interrogators should know that there are certain circumstances in which it would be ethical to break the law.  Indeed, there are circumstances in which you would have to be a monster not to break the law. If an interrogator found himself in such a circumstance and broke the law, there would be little will to prosecute him (and interrogators would know this).  If he broke the law Abu Ghraib-style, he will go to prison for a very long time (and interrogators would know this too).  At the moment, this seems like the most reasonable policy to me.
The best case against “ticking-bomb” arguments appears in David Luban’s article, “Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb,” published in the Virginia Law Review. (I have posted a PDF here.) Luban relies on a few questionable assumptions, however. And he does not actually provide an ethical argument against torture in the ticking-bomb case; he offers a pragmatic argument against our instituting a policy allowing torture in such cases.  There is absolutely nothing in Luban’s argument that rules out the following law:

We will not torture anyone under any circumstances unless we are certain, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the person in our custody has operational knowledge of an imminent act of nuclear terrorism.

It seems to me that unless one can produce an ethical argument against torturing such a person, one does not have an argument against the use of torture in principle.  Of course, my discussion of torture in The End of Faith (and on this page) addresses only the ethics of torture—not the practical difficulties of implementing a policy based on the ethics. 
Many readers have found my views on this topic deeply unsettling.  (For what it’s worth, I do too. It would be much easier to simply be “against torture” across the board and end the discussion.) I have invited readers, both publicly and privately, to produce an ethical argument that takes into account the realities of our world—our daily acceptance of collateral damage, the real possibility of nuclear terrorism, etc.—and yet rules out a practice like water-boarding in all conceivable circumstances. No one, to my knowledge, has done this. And yet, most people continue to speak and write as though a knockdown argument against torture in all circumstances were readily available. I consider it to be one of the more dangerous ironies of liberal discourse that merely discussing the possibility of torturing a man like Osama bin Laden provokes more outrage than the maiming and murder of children ever does. Until someone actually points out what is wrong with the collateral-damage argument presented in The End of Faith, I will continue to believe that its critics are just not thinking clearly about the reality of human suffering.
(For what it’s worth, I have since discovered that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy basically takes the same view.)
My discussion of killing people “for what they believe” (pp. 52-53 in The End of Faith) (link to here)
The following passage seems to have been selectively quoted, and misconstrued, more than any other I have written:

The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense. This is what the United States attempted in Afghanistan, and it is what we and other Western powers are bound to attempt, at an even greater cost to ourselves and to innocents abroad, elsewhere in the Muslim world. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.

This paragraph appears after a long discussion of the role that belief plays in governing human behavior, and it should be read in that context. Some critics have interpreted the second sentence of this passage to mean that I advocate simply killing religious people for their beliefs. Granted, I made the job of misinterpreting me easier than it might have been, but such a reading remains a frank distortion of my views. To someone reading the passage in context, it should be clear that I am discussing the link between belief and behavior. The fact that belief determines behavior is what makes certain beliefs so dangerous.
When one asks why it would be ethical to drop a bomb on Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current leader of al Qaeda, the answer cannot be, “Because he killed so many people in the past.” To my knowledge, the man hasn’t killed anyone personally. However, he is likely to get a lot of innocent people killed because of what he and his followers believe about jihad, martyrdom, the ascendancy of Islam, etc. A willingness to take preventative action against a dangerous enemy is compatible with being against the death penalty (which I am). Whenever we can capture and imprison jihadists, we should. But in many cases this is either impossible or too risky. Would it have been better if we had captured Osama bin Laden? In my view, yes. Do I think the members of Seal Team Six should have assumed any added risk to bring him back alive? Absolutely not.
My position on the war in Iraq (link to here)
I have never written or spoken in support of the war in Iraq. This has not stopped a “journalist” like Glenn Greenwald from castigating me as a warmonger (Which is especially rich, given that he supported the war. In fact, in 2005 he appeared less critical of U.S. foreign policy than I am.) The truth is, I have never known what to think about this war, apart from the obvious: 1) prospectively, it seemed like a very dangerous distraction from the ongoing war in Afghanistan; 2) retrospectively, it was a disaster. Much of the responsibility for this disaster falls on the Bush administration, and one of the administration’s great failings was to underestimate the religious sectarianism of the Iraqi people. Whatever one may think about the rationale for invading Iraq and the prosecution of the war, there is nothing about the conflict that makes Islam look benign—not the reflexive solidarity expressed throughout the Muslim world for Saddam Hussein (merely because an army of “infidels” attacked him), not the endless supply of suicide bombers willing to kill Iraqi noncombatants, not the insurgency’s use of women and children as human shields, not the ritual slaughter of journalists and aid workers, not the steady influx of jihadis from neighboring countries, and not the current state of public opinion among European and American Muslims. It seems to me that no reasonable person can conclude that these phenomena are purely the result of U.S. foreign policy.


http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/response-to-controversy


Why the lefties of this world are clueless

Yeah says a man living in a nation that Murder and raped it's way way to empire Literally didn't give up the last parts of it until the 1970's AND STILL has not returned the wealth it stole.

Yeah Sam Harris is A dumb fuck
He need to Understand WE ARE NOT GOOD people like him particularly so.
as long as we find these Drone stats acceptable we cannot talk about being 'good'
http://drones.pitchinteractive.com/
Moral Equivalence BOMBING FUCKING SCHOOLS!!! Western forces have killed Hundreds of children this way. only 2% of bombing victims are targets of Value According to our own break down.

Fuck his global society any global society that believes like him IS NOT ONE most people want Something neither YOU nor HIM seem to understand. most people see him as dumb evil hate filled fuck As evidenced by the his own quotes. We don't want people like him any nearer to power than a mad mullah Both are dumb ass hate filled simple tribe minded people. not evolved to modern mindsets still need to Call out an enemy Still promotes the need to Attack and fight and hate as opposed to convince and convert and DEMONSTRATE why the fuck should Islam love you or him, you hate it Openly you say so, SO WHY should it be the bigger person than you? IF you are incapable of NOT hating why should they?

You may swallow Propaganda hook line and sinker BUT thankfully most people can smell the bullshit that comes out of Sam's mouth.

Nobody gives a fuck what you think Veya, you are one deranged left wing extremist.


So again I ask who did Sam compare Dick Cheney to?
Then tell me and argue the difference if any of you left wing idiots dare to.
Or shall I just prove how utterly clueless many of you are.

Brasidas wrote:Nobody gives a fuck what you think Veya, you are one deranged left wing extremist.


So again I ask who did Sam compare Dick Cheney to?
Then tell me and argue the difference if any of you left wing idiots dare to.
Or shall I just prove how utterly clueless many of you are.

He said the left compares Cheney to al-Baghdadi (did you read my post?), which is obviously fallacious, and Harris himself compared Cheney to the Allies, which is practically sacrilegious.

Again, did you read my post in which Cheney did a jaw-dropping 180 on the nature of the relationship between Iraq in al-Qaeda that beggars belief? You can't possibly think that man was motivated by any good intent.

Just to underline it a bit, here's one of the directives Cheney's good buddy Donald Rumsfeld wrote hours after the 9/11 attacks:

"Best info fast. Judge whether good enough [to] hit SH at same time - not only UBL [Pentagon shorthand for Usama/Osama bin Laden]."

Does that sound like someone who's trying to right a wrong?

Seriously, just because Harris is an outspoken atheist doesn't mean you have to knee-jerk agree with everything he says. Cheney also presided over a program in which people who hadn't even been convicted of wrongdoing were subjected to torture that had long been ruled illegal in the United States for anyone, no matter what they had done. He's no Nazi fighter and isn't good enough to lick the boots of anybody who fought on the Allied side.

Ben_Reilly wrote:

Brasidas wrote:Nobody gives a fuck what you think Veya, you are one deranged left wing extremist.


So again I ask who did Sam compare Dick Cheney to?
Then tell me and argue the difference if any of you left wing idiots dare to.
Or shall I just prove how utterly clueless many of you are.

He said the left compares Cheney to al-Baghdadi (did you read my post?), which is obviously fallacious, and Harris himself compared Cheney to the Allies, which is practically sacrilegious.

Again, did you read my post in which Cheney did a jaw-dropping 180 on the nature of the relationship between Iraq in al-Qaeda that beggars belief? You can't possibly think that man was motivated by any good intent.

Just to underline it a bit, here's one of the directives Cheney's good buddy Donald Rumsfeld wrote hours after the 9/11 attacks:

"Best info fast. Judge whether good enough [to] hit SH at same time - not only UBL [Pentagon shorthand for Usama/Osama bin Laden]."

Does that sound like someone who's trying to right a wrong?

He only compared Dick to al-Baghdadi showing you clearly did not graps what he is saying and still fail to do so. So again it matters not what he has said but what he believes in and what he backs in his actions compared to the religious nutball.
So you have failed to give a moral comparrison between two shoiwing how utterly clueless you are on the point Sam was making
between the two individuals.
Do you even understand what is being stated, because you clearly proved you do not.
To give you an example of the difference between intent you only have to look at the conflict with Israel and Hamas with intent, would you like me to educate you on this to help you understand?

Ben_Reilly wrote:Seriously, just because Harris is an outspoken atheist doesn't mean you have to knee-jerk agree with everything he says. Cheney also presided over a program in which people who hadn't even been convicted of wrongdoing were subjected to torture that had long been ruled illegal in the United States for anyone, no matter what they had done. He's no Nazi fighter and isn't good enough to lick the boots of anybody who fought on the Allied side.

Again is that even equivelant to Al-Baghdadi?
You see this is why you are so easily confused.
This is not to say that Dick is wrong, he certainly is in his actions but they are miles removed from the moral equivalence of Al-Baghdadi.
Do you now begin to understand the difference being made.
Sam never claimed some things were not wrong but is placing quite rightly in context between the two individuals.

He's trying to say that a religiously motivated terrorist's body count is not the same as the body count of someone who intends to make the world a better place. That is really obvious.

I'm taking issue with Harris' premise that Cheney ever meant to make the world a better place for anybody besides oil companies who now don't have to deal with the fact that Iraq, with third-most abundant oil reserves in the world, had nationalized its oil economy under Saddam.

I'm saying that Cheney is a bad person and you can't compare him to anybody who fought bad people -- or to a terrorist. He is, as I said the first time I responded to this, a power-grabbing sociopath who simply didn't care about his body count.

Cheney's not a terrorist. He's pathologically selfish and would have been Hitler's friend if Hitler stood to make him rich.

Dick Cheney invaded a country without reason. He tortured innocent people. He has a gay daughter and is against gay marriage. He lied to the people of my country over and over again in a way that was designed to scare us into supporting bad things.

I'm not saying he deliberately killed anybody, but he didn't deliberately protect anyone either. I'm having a very difficult time seeing how anybody has been "too hard" on him.

Ben_Reilly wrote:He's trying to say that a religiously motivated terrorist's body count is not the same as the body count of someone who intends to make the world a better place. That is really obvious.

I'm taking issue with Harris' premise that Cheney ever meant to make the world a better place for anybody besides oil companies who now don't have to deal with the fact that Iraq, with third-most abundant oil reserves in the world, had nationalized its oil economy under Saddam.

I'm saying that Cheney is a bad person and you can't compare him to anybody who fought bad people -- or to a terrorist. He is, as I said the first time I responded to this, a power-grabbing sociopath who simply didn't care about his body count.

Cheney's not a terrorist. He's pathologically selfish and would have been Hitler's friend if Hitler stood to make him rich.

Dick Cheney invaded a country without reason. He tortured innocent people. He has a gay daughter and is against gay marriage. He lied to the people of my country over and over again in a way that was designed to scare us into supporting bad things.

I'm not saying he deliberately killed anybody, but he didn't deliberately protect anyone either. I'm having a very difficult time seeing how anybody has been "too hard" on him.

Absolutely! He made a fortune out of Iraq.

I see the other left wing extremist also misses the point.

Brasidas wrote:I see the other left wing extremist also misses the point.

I say this not as an insult but in complete honesty -- you are a stupid, silly person. Take care

Ben_Reilly wrote:

Brasidas wrote:I see the other left wing extremist also misses the point.

I say this not as an insult but in complete honesty -- you are a stupid, silly person. Take care

And I think you are a brain dead ignorant lefty who now runs away from the debate, because you know I am correct ha ha
Run along little boy and play at sports as that is all you are good at.
Stick to knowing what you know best and allow the adults to deal in the real world;

Brasidas wrote:

Ben_Reilly wrote:

Brasidas wrote:I see the other left wing extremist also misses the point.

I say this not as an insult but in complete honesty -- you are a stupid, silly person. Take care

And I think you are a brain dead ignorant lefty who now runs away from the debate, because you know I am correct ha ha
Run along little boy and play at sports as that is all you are good at.
Stick to knowing what you know best and allow the adults to deal in the real world;

Wow, this is all really just a game of one upmanship to you, isn't it?

Fine, you're a double doody head. And Sally said you peed yourself on the playground.

Ben_Reilly wrote:

Brasidas wrote:

And I think you are a brain dead ignorant lefty who now runs away from the debate, because you know I am correct ha ha
Run along little boy and play at sports as that is all you are good at.
Stick to knowing what you know best and allow the adults to deal in the real world;

Wow, this is all really just a game of one upmanship to you, isn't it?

Fine, you're a double doody head. And Sally said you peed yourself on the playground.

Ben_Reilly wrote:

Brasidas wrote:

And I think you are a brain dead ignorant lefty who now runs away from the debate, because you know I am correct ha ha
Run along little boy and play at sports as that is all you are good at.
Stick to knowing what you know best and allow the adults to deal in the real world;

Wow, this is all really just a game of one upmanship to you, isn't it?

Fine, you're a double doody head. And Sally said you peed yourself on the playground.

Actually its all about how you fail to understand what a moral equivalence is, which you just proved how you failed to understand this between two people so far removed and yet you tried to stupidly compare them.
So its no game, I just get bored of the utterly pathetic moral attitudes of the left.
If you do not like this tough shit.
So thanks for your childish reply it just backs up the very view point I have of the left.
Like am immature spoilt child who stamps their feet when they do not get their way.

Brasidas wrote:

Ben_Reilly wrote:

Brasidas wrote:

And I think you are a brain dead ignorant lefty who now runs away from the debate, because you know I am correct ha ha
Run along little boy and play at sports as that is all you are good at.
Stick to knowing what you know best and allow the adults to deal in the real world;

Wow, this is all really just a game of one upmanship to you, isn't it?

Fine, you're a double doody head. And Sally said you peed yourself on the playground.

Actually its all about how you fail to understand what a moral equivalence is, which you just proved how you failed to understand this between two people so far removed and yet you tried to stupidly compare them.
So its no game, I just get bored of the utterly pathetic moral attitudes of the left.
If you do not like this tough shit.
So thanks for your childish reply it just backs up the very view point I have of the left.
Like am immature spoilt child who stamps their feet when they do not get their way.

Actually, friend, I believe I was keeping it pretty cordial and then you called me a dickhead.

Maybe try getting the reins on your emotions before you hit "send." This is a thread about being "too hard" on Dick Cheney. DICK. CHENEY.

I would hate to see you lose your way.

Ben_Reilly wrote:

Brasidas wrote:


Actually its all about how you fail to understand what a moral equivalence is, which you just proved how you failed to understand this between two people so far removed and yet you tried to stupidly compare them.
So its no game, I just get bored of the utterly pathetic moral attitudes of the left.
If you do not like this tough shit.
So thanks for your childish reply it just backs up the very view point I have of the left.
Like am immature spoilt child who stamps their feet when they do not get their way.

Actually, friend, I believe I was keeping it pretty cordial and then you called me a dickhead.

Maybe try getting the reins on your emotions before you hit "send." This is a thread about being "too hard" on Dick Cheney. DICK. CHENEY.

I would hate to see you lose your way.

On this topic you are a dickhead and please spare me the moral attitude in regards to providing some pontificating view as you always do on you have hope for me yet that you hold the higher moral ground, when clearly here you do not.
This is a thread about moral equivalence, you then got yout knickers in a twist because Dick was brought up comapred to Al-Baghdadi.
So do not tell me about losing my way you condescending dickhead.
I have nothing personal against you but will bash you when you show yourself up to big a complete dick as you have been on a comparrison.
It means you do not understand yet again what has been stated.
So you have no exuse for your comments either as two wrongs do not make a right.
I am not going to apologise for you rightly being called a dickhead on something you just woefully proved you know little about.
I suggest you get used to that.
You lefties are so sensitive it cracks me up

I'm not asking for an apology at all! I would just ask you if you actually read the headline you yourself wrote. You do realize that whatever point you're trying to make, it's going to be framed by others who don't share your headspace in terms of the words you actually write. And the words you wrote included the phrase: "The left is too hard on Dick Cheney."

Seriously, just think about that and how it might sound to an American liberal who actually lived for eight years with that man acting like he spoke for me and everyone in my country.

Think about what Cheney has actually done in his life and ask yourself, independently of whatever point you meant to make, if anybody has actually been "too hard" on Dick Cheney.

You said early that I "hate" the man. Actually, I try not to think about him. I imagine you do the same about some of your own politicians, but if hating Dick Cheney is wrong, I don't want to live on this planet anymore, you know?

Ben_Reilly wrote:I'm not asking for an apology at all! I would just ask you if you actually read the headline you yourself wrote. You do realize that whatever point you're trying to make, it's going to be framed by others who don't share your headspace in terms of the words you actually write. And the words you wrote included the phrase: "The left is too hard on Dick Cheney."

Seriously, just think about that and how it might sound to an American liberal who actually lived for eight years with that man acting like he spoke for me and everyone in my country.

Think about what Cheney has actually done in his life and ask yourself, independently of whatever point you meant to make, if anybody has actually been "too hard" on Dick Cheney.

You said early that I "hate" the man. Actually, I try not to think about him. I imagine you do the same about some of your own politicians, but if hating Dick Cheney is wrong, I don't want to live on this planet anymore, you know?

I never wrote the headline, jesus, who silly do you wish to continue to be, that was Sassy
Never claimed any such thing the left are too hard on Dick, or is that you again not reading where I posted someone elses views.
Again you are comparring more Dick to yourself and not Al-Baghdadi, seriously this is why you have no argument here, because the comparrison you are making is not what was stated, or can you not even see that Ben?
Now again if your view is to compare to another american say, then that is a different argument being made, not one compared to a genocidal killer in Al-Baghdadi.
This is why you have no moral stand point on any of this because again you fail to see who the comparrison is being made against and at the end of the day I think Sam has far more qualifications that some sport writer on this, would you not agree?

Ben_Reilly wrote:I'm not asking for an apology at all! I would just ask you if you actually read the headline you yourself wrote. You do realize that whatever point you're trying to make, it's going to be framed by others who don't share your headspace in terms of the words you actually write. And the words you wrote included the phrase: "The left is too hard on Dick Cheney."

?

That really has to be the worst insult you can give me, to confuse me with the Jew hater who started this thread.

So not even Sam Harris claimed the left were too hard on Dick but it was something completely invented by Sassy and this what you are arguing off Ben.
See how disingenuous the left are in how Sassy has manipulated something not even claimed by Harris, which you are going off something she has said and not Sam.

So come Ben, own up and admit you have got everything wrong here. You wrongly thought I made the comments and in fact Sam did not make them, only Sassy did and thus everyone is going off what Sassy invented to argue off here.

I shall await your apology for getting this wrong on wrongly accusing me and Sam to something Sassy invented.

In your own time or are you to much of a coward to admit you got this wrong?

Brasidas wrote:So not even Sam Harris claimed the left were too hard on Dick but it was something completely invented by Sassy and this what you are arguing off Ben.
See how disingenuous the left are in how Sassy has manipulated something not even claimed by Harris, which you are going off something she has said and not Sam.

Ah, my mistake, I thought you'd posted this. Still, the sentiment is echoed in Harris' words, and to be blunt, it's obscene. You only have to look at Cheney's objectively recorded actions to know that his record doesn't deserve the whitewashing he gets here.

Frankly, it suggests to me that Harris is being driven past the point of objection to violence that perpetrators claim in the name of Islam and into Islamophobia-lite.

If not acceptable, it would be understandable -- he's gotten a lot of praise from a lot of bigots lately.

By the way, please can the "in your own time" stuff -- it's past 3:30 a.m. here in the States! I was going to finish up an episode of "Mad Men" and then turn in ...

'There is a difference between the Dick Cheney's of this world and the Al Bagjdadi's of the world and Chomsky has been a source of pure moral confusion on this point.'

He has? I think he has shown that both are as evil as they come, they just cloak it with different rhetoric.

Ben_Reilly wrote:By the way, please can the "in your own time" stuff -- it's past 3:30 a.m. here in the States! I was going to finish up an episode of "Mad Men" and then turn in ...

Sounds like a plan. You're not good with sleep are you!

Ben_Reilly wrote:

Brasidas wrote:So not even Sam Harris claimed the left were too hard on Dick but it was something completely invented by Sassy and this what you are arguing off Ben.
See how disingenuous the left are in how Sassy has manipulated something not even claimed by Harris, which you are going off something she has said and not Sam.

Ah, my mistake, I thought you'd posted this. Still, the sentiment is echoed in Harris' words, and to be blunt, it's obscene. You only have to look at Cheney's objectively recorded actions to know that his record doesn't deserve the whitewashing he gets here.

Frankly, it suggests to me that Harris is being driven past the point of objection to violence that perpetrators claim in the name of Islam and into Islamophobia-lite.

If not acceptable, it would be understandable -- he's gotten a lot of praise from a lot of bigots lately.

Its not echoed in Sams words, because as seen Sassy invented a claim not replicated by Sam at all as all he did was state quite clearly you cannot compare Dick and Al-Baghdadi and his 100% correct on this, which is why you went off the invented headline of Sassy.
I suggest you listen aagin without the invented headline that Sassy made and you will see how ever so much you have been in error here.
So again it shows you failed to even understand the point Sam was making and he only made a passing comment about Dick and yet his whole comments have been turned to make it all about Dick when it never was.
Trust the left to be so easily bought in by another lefty.

risingsun wrote:'There is a difference between the Dick Cheney's of this world and the Al Bagjdadi's of the world and Chomsky has been a source of pure moral confusion on this point.'

He has?   I think he has shown that both are as evil as they come, they just cloak it with different rhetoric.

Which proves why you are a complete idiot if you cannot see the difference

risingsun wrote:'There is a difference between the Dick Cheney's of this world and the Al Bagjdadi's of the world and Chomsky has been a source of pure moral confusion on this point.'

He has?   I think he has shown that both are as evil as they come, they just cloak it with different rhetoric.

If Harris thinks we should give Cheney a break, wonder what his views on BUSH are!!!!!!!

Ben_Reilly wrote:By the way, please can the "in your own time" stuff -- it's past 3:30 a.m. here in the States! I was going to finish up an episode of "Mad Men" and then turn in ...

Why whinge about what it is, you only have yourselr to blame on this, not me, I just get bored where even now Sassy believes there is a moral equivalence between Dick and Al-Baghdadi, that is bonkers and shows how stupid the left really are.

risingsun wrote:

risingsun wrote:'There is a difference between the Dick Cheney's of this world and the Al Bagjdadi's of the world and Chomsky has been a source of pure moral confusion on this point.'

He has?   I think he has shown that both are as evil as they come, they just cloak it with different rhetoric.

If Harris thinks we should give Cheney a break, wonder what his views on BUSH are!!!!!!!

He never even said to give a break that was you the Jew hater, invented things not said.
Now does Dick advocate throwing homosexuals off roof tops?
No
Does he advopcate beheading Journalists?
No

I could go on, but if people cannot see the clear difference then they are as I stated complete dickheads

Brasidas wrote:

Ben_Reilly wrote:

Brasidas wrote:So not even Sam Harris claimed the left were too hard on Dick but it was something completely invented by Sassy and this what you are arguing off Ben.
See how disingenuous the left are in how Sassy has manipulated something not even claimed by Harris, which you are going off something she has said and not Sam.

Ah, my mistake, I thought you'd posted this. Still, the sentiment is echoed in Harris' words, and to be blunt, it's obscene. You only have to look at Cheney's objectively recorded actions to know that his record doesn't deserve the whitewashing he gets here.

Frankly, it suggests to me that Harris is being driven past the point of objection to violence that perpetrators claim in the name of Islam and into Islamophobia-lite.

If not acceptable, it would be understandable -- he's gotten a lot of praise from a lot of bigots lately.

Its not echoed in Sams words, because as seen Sassy invented a claim not replicated by Sam at all as all he did was state quite clearly you cannot compare Dick and Al-Baghdadi and his 100% correct on this, which is why you went off the invented headline of Sassy.
I suggest you listen aagin without the invented headline that Sassy made and you will see how ever so much you have been in error here.
So again it shows you failed to even understand the point Sam was making and he only made a passing comment about Dick and yet his whole comments have been turned to make it all about Dick when it never was.
Trust the left to be so easily bought in by another lefty.

Hahahaha, if he meant to distinguish between evils he could have done a HELL of a lot better than Cheney. I mean, I'm used to the right saying that people like me see too many shades of gray, but that takes the ever-loving cake. He clearly put Cheney into the Nazi-fighting, oops-I-killed-a-French-family-so-sorry category, and really ... just -- REALLY. I mean, you're playing a game if you don't think that's what he was saying.

The man starts by differentiating the unintentional casualties of the Allies vs. the evil of the Nazis and then proceeds to differentiate Cheney and the head of ISIS?

Oh yeah, surely just a big fucking coincidence

The problem is not any false equivalence, which nobody actually makes, between Cheney and al-Baghdadi. The problem is Harris' obscene equivalence between Allied casualties of war and ANYTHING Cheney ever did.

Ben_Reilly wrote:

Brasidas wrote:

Its not echoed in Sams words, because as seen Sassy invented a claim not replicated by Sam at all as all he did was state quite clearly you cannot compare Dick and Al-Baghdadi and his 100% correct on this, which is why you went off the invented headline of Sassy.
I suggest you listen aagin without the invented headline that Sassy made and you will see how ever so much you have been in error here.
So again it shows you failed to even understand the point Sam was making and he only made a passing comment about Dick and yet his whole comments have been turned to make it all about Dick when it never was.
Trust the left to be so easily bought in by another lefty.

Hahahaha, if he meant to distinguish between evils he could have done a HELL of a lot better than Cheney. I mean, I'm used to the right saying that people like me see too many shades of gray, but that takes the ever-loving cake. He clearly put Cheney into the Nazi-fighting, oops-I-killed-a-French-family-so-sorry category, and really ... just -- REALLY. I mean, you're playing a game if you don't think that's what he was saying.

The man starts by differentiating the unintentional casualties of the Allies vs. the evil of the Nazis and then proceeds to differentiate Cheney and the head of ISIS?

Oh yeah, surely just a big fucking coincidence

Again I suggest you listen again as he only showed in comparrison to Al-Baghdadi and not WW2, that is you wrongly not listening to the context. This whole thread got off to the wrong foot because Sassy manipulated you all just by her headline.
That is how easy the left are led and as seen you all were.
He is explaing about moral equivalence, he moved on from WW2 tro then compare the two.
So I ask again:

Now does Dick advocate throwing homosexuals off roof tops?
No
Does he advocate beheading Journalists?
No

I could go on, but if people cannot see the clear difference then they are as I stated complete dickheads

Ben_Reilly wrote:The problem is not any false equivalence, which nobody actually makes, between Cheney and al-Baghdadi. The problem is Harris' obscene equivalence between Allied casualties of war and ANYTHING Cheney ever did.

Fabrication.
He never compared anything with Dick and WW2
In fact please point out anywhere that he did.

Brasidas wrote:

Ben_Reilly wrote:The problem is not any false equivalence, which nobody actually makes, between Cheney and al-Baghdadi. The problem is Harris' obscene equivalence between Allied casualties of war and ANYTHING Cheney ever did.

Fabrication.
He never compared anything with Dick and WW2
In fact please point out anywhere that he did.

To summarize:

"Noam Chomsky only looks at body counts. That's like comparing the body count of the Allies to the body count of Hitler. Hitler intended to kill Jewish people. The Allies were only trying to stop Hitler. You can't disregard intent. Dick Cheney is no al-Baghdadi."

Sorry, that was more subtle than your brain is equipped to deal with. He compares the Allies to the Nazis, then Cheney to al-Baghdadi. Thus, Cheney's the Allies, al-Baghdadi is Hitler.

Except Cheney is actually Norman Bates with an office in the White House.

Ben_Reilly wrote:

Brasidas wrote:


Fabrication.
He never compared anything with Dick and WW2
In fact please point out anywhere that he did.

To summarize:

"Noam Chomsky only looks at body counts. That's like comparing the body count of the Allies to the body count of Hitler. Hitler intended to kill Jewish people. The Allies were only trying to stop Hitler. You can't disregard intent. Dick Cheney is no al-Baghdadi."

Thank you lets read it again for the really stupid:

Who does he compare here:

"Noam Chomsky only looks at body counts. That's like comparing the body count of the Allies to the body count of Hitler. Hitler intended to kill Jewish people. The Allies were only trying to stop Hitler.

Hitler and the allies is the comparrison:

Next he eludes to:

You can't disregard intent. [b]Dick Cheney is no al-Baghdadi


Thanks Ben for showing how utterly dumb you are ha ha

Read my next fucking post, Speedy Gonzalez.

Ben_Reilly wrote:Read my next fucking post, Speedy Gonzalez.

I did read it dumbo and PMSL

Seriously go to bed you idiot, you are getting even more embarressing, where you again get it wrong.