Is he going to persuade someone who does not have TDS to get it? No way. He's way too over the top for that.
But may he persuade some other people with TDS to oppose wokery? And does the fact that he has severe TDS give him more credibility to do that? Yes.
So on net balance, he's a force for the good.
He is a net evil.
The man is a open globalist who pushes the idea that technocrats should completely rule and re-shape society.
His opinions on wokeness are irrelevant when he is part of the Cathedral and is part of the push to help ensure people don't question mainstream narratives.
The so called IDWers like Sam Harris and Eric Weinstein are a huge problem to opposing globalism as they solely exist to ensure certain people will never oppose this system.
Don't you think he may be a gateway drug for better stuff?
If someone is a complete BLM/Current Thing NPC, there's no hope of any improvement. The jump from that to anything reasonable is just too big.
Let Harris introduce them to the fact that BLM is a completely phony narrative. That's at least one Cathedral lie they'll recognize. Perhaps they will wonder what else is being lied about. They may wonder why all the 'experts' and 'technocrats' espouse something that is not only a lie, but a blatant, transparent and contemptible lie.
I don't see him persuading anyone who recognizes today's evils into becoming a lackey of the establishment.
He is the definition of a limited hangout.
He is a pressure valve that exists to relieve some of the cognitive dissonance that an average person faces in society but he still restricts the discussion in terms that are very favorable for the establishment.
If you were to instead suggest that someone like James Lindsay or Christopher Rufo are net good I would then agree with you.
These two men are still classical liberals and are a bit naive on a few topics but they will atleast openly acknowledge that the right needs to use political power against the establishment to stop the evils of CRT, wokeness, ESG.
James was even banned off Twitter for calling out groomers and he also talked about the WEF extensively.
There is no place to defend scum like Sam Harris when you have so many other options who can serve as a gateway into being actually realistic about the world.
Sam Harris is not the answer to any problem. People like him are the problem!
Especially Rufo is off the charts good. But those are not 'hard cases'. Harris is complicated.
They're not going to appeal to the kind of normies that Harris can appeal to. That is why he is good. Hence 'gateway drug'.
This is dogma, not a reasonable look at what's going on.
There is nothing complicated about the fact that Sam Harris exists to keep normies enmeshed in the overall globalist framework.
He is not a gateway into anything but rather a pressure valve that offers a false sense of relief.
It is not even remotely close to dogma to condemn one of the most authoritarian individuals that still sadly has a sizeable platform
Do you suppose those who listen to Sam Harris would otherwise be Cathedral critics, if it were not for him?
No my point is that they will remain part of the Cathedral after they listened to Harris.
These normies were part of the Cathedral before they listened to him and the problem is that listening to him ensures they will remain part of it.
He creates midwits in his totalitarian technocrat image.
That is a net negative to society.
How though? If they're normies, it means they buy normie narratives, like BLM.
How does it make them worse by being exposed to the fact that the BLM narrative if completely phony?
Harris doesn't want to stop the decline towards bug eaters fucking mutilated pod children. He wants the regime to stop being so obvious and lull the population back to sleep as they were under Clinton or Blair.
In The Moral Landscape he literally advocates for pumping people's brains full of "pleasurable endorphins" associated with altruism, if such a thing were possible.
He also repeatedly says that society should be governed by "moral experts" who decide what is best for the collective good, then make and enforce laws accordingly. That goes well beyond even WEF-style technocracy.
One of the only things I've ever read by Noam Chomsky that I actually found agreeable was his part in an e-mail exchange between himself and Harris, where Harris defends Bill Clinton's bombing of a Sudanese hospital with civilians still inside of it, based on faulty intelligence that it was being used to make bio-weapons. As soon as Chomsky published that exchange, Harris threw a tantrum and started whining that it was private correspondence and he never agreed to make it public, even though in the e-mail exchange, he agreed to Chomsky's stated intention to publish it. He was just butthurt because he got destroyed in the debate and it made him look bad.
The man is an outright totalitarian, and always has been. The kind of totalitarian that only someone who never emotionally matured past their adolescence can be. He thinks he has all then answers and he genuinely believes he knows better how to manage the lives of billions of people if we would just let him make all of our decisions for us. The fact that he's too stupid to realize how insane that is only further undermines whatever good he might do. He's a mental pygmy who makes his living by sounding smarter than he is.
Sam Harris is the definition of a very dangerous midwit.
He truly believes globalist technocracy will usher in an utopian age for humanity.
The worst atrocities in history stem from men who became complete monsters in their relentless pursuit of an utopia.
Nothing will help an average man more than learning that all decisions in life involve trade-offs. Sam Harris is incapable of acknowledging such a simple fact of life.
Sam Harris pushes the message that trusting technocrats is the only "intelligent" path forward.
This is what makes him truly one of the most dangerous voices with a platform.
Some of his views are sociopathic.
But I'm not talking about the desirability of his views.
That is the impression I got from his recent Trump outburst. He'll decide who is 'bad' and should therefore be screwed over by powerful institutions. The hypocrisy is just off the charts.
Even with all this in mind, my logic still applies.
Maybe it's just the petty, adolescent part of my own personality, which might make me a bit of a hypocrite, but I get a visceral, cathartic pleasure from seeing people like Harris publicly humiliated. I don't want to keep him around to use as a recruiting tool. Frankly, even the rational side of me thinks he'd be more effective at that when he's reduced to a sputtering, stuttering, incoherent shambles, clinging desperately to his hagiographic self-image even as he's forced to acknowledge how wrong and stupid he is.
Eh, you assume that it will end his career. It won't. So it's basically a win-win. He showed the id of the ruling class, while also gaining credibility with the ultra-left crazies, which he could leverage to persuade them of something actually good.
It comes as absolutely zero surprise that you would leap to the defense of Harris. Birds of a feather.
Anyone who jumps to the defense of Sam Harris like this is someone I would consider to be as the kids these days say "looking pretty sus".
Do you have an actual counter-argument, or your usual?
I'm not addressing your argument, I'm saying that it's pretty telling that the likes of you try to defend the likes of him.
Shocker.
And what was the 'defense' again?
Feigning ignorance, your usual tactic. It's no wonder so much of this sub has sussed you out by now.
Well that and all the fake vaccine pushing. That's just inhuman.
OK, so once again, you have nothing with which to back up your claims.
Except your rage over being called out for your defense of the Nazis in Germany.
I'm not claiming anything beyond that it's suspicious at best to see you rush to the defense of a man who proclaimed that he'd rather a child murderer be in office than Trump, because Trump hurt his precious feelings. You're circling the wagons for a genuinely evil man, who seeks nothing more than the destruction of civilization.
And in response, you have resorted to the typical redditard reflex of bleating "source! source!" like it's a magic password to dispel accurate criticism.
You're disgusting and evil.
See, at least try to make it less obvious that you're lying. Pointing out that he may be useful is not a defense of the man.
Speaking of child murderers, a regime that you support committed a great number of those.
Substantiating your claims always was a great weakness. I know you'd rather have your claims be accepted at face value.
Says the Hitler supporter.
You a big Peterson fan are ya?
I actually agree. Sam Harris going full blown TDS can only help people, there are 2 type of people who are going to be affected . Those more on the left with TDS that may find a home in the center and those on the fence that will be moved to the right do to Sam being a nut case.
Harris is too hung up on trashing religion to lend much of his hot air to broadcasting a similar critique of the neo-Marxist capture of our institutions and bureaucracies.
He's a materialist technocrat whose main act is beating the dead horse of atheism.
I think his meltdown on Triggernometry destroyed his career as a boring public douchebag. At least I hope it did.