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When a Song Becomes a Threat: SAE and “Speech”

By Chris Hall
March 15, 2015
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noose photo

Photo by theglobalpanorama

I’m pretty sure that although intent might not be magic, we white people must surely be magic. The proof is in the media response to the SAE lynching chant. Most of it magically turns white racism into something that’s black peoples’ fault. That’s amazing. It can’t be done with rationality or anything else of this world, so it must be magic. For an antidote to all that, here’s a great summary by Ellie Mystal on how the words of the chant go beyond simply being “speech” and turn into a threat when looked at through black history:

Now, I get how a white listener wouldn’t take the threat as a true threat. They weren’t threatening Eugene Volokh. And, I don’t know, maybe when white people are by themselves, they talk like this and they all understand that they don’t actually intend to solicit a lynch mob to go after the black people on campus. Who knows what you say when I’m not around. Maybe white people are just used to chants about hanging people from trees, and intuitively know that the drunk frat boys weren’t serious?

But that’s not really an objective reading of the situation, at least if we dispense with the notion that the white perspective is the only objective one. Objectively, a bus of drunk white people were singing about hanging people. Buses of drunk white people singing about hanging folks is a true threat, because sometimes buses of drunk white people then actually go out and hang people. IT’S HAPPENED BEFORE.

In fact, I’m getting pretty sick of white people telling me how I’m supposed to perceive threats from white people. Of course I perceive the chant as an attempt to solicit a criminal act. How could I not? Don’t most hate crimes committed against African-Americans start with drunk douchebags talking about n***ers?

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Filed Under: Asides, Quotables, Ramblings Tagged With: fraternities, lynching, racism, SAE fraternity, white supremacy

Sam Harris Doesn’t Get Better In Context

By Chris Hall
October 13, 2014
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I think that Friendly Atheist would benefit vastly if they just dropped Terry Firma.
 Every time I see something that really makes me cringe on that blog, it’s got his byline on it. Today, Terry’s trying to defend Sam Harris using the “out of context” argument. That can certainly be a valid argument, but it’s also something that a lot of people use as a weasel excuse when someone calls them on saying something particularly stupid and appalling. In Harris’s case, he got called on saying something appalling when this image started getting passed around Twitter:

Head shot of Sam Harris with quote: "Some beliefs are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them."Terry thinks that the use of that one line to represent Harris’s views is a dishonest smear. But frankly, it doesn’t sound any better when you place it in context. Here’s what Harris himself considers to the be the proper context. From pages 52-53 of his book The End of Faith:

The power that belief has over our emotional lives appears to be total. For every emotion that you are capable of feeling, there is surely a belief that could invoke it in a matter of moments. Consider the following proposition:

Your daughter is being slowly tortured in an English jail.

What is it that stands between you and the absolute panic that such a proposition would loose in the mind and body of a person who believed it? Perhaps you do not have a daughter, or you know her to be safely at home, or you believe that English jailors are renowned for their congeniality. Whatever the reason, the door to belief has not yet swung upon its hinges.

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.

(Emphasis added)

It’s crap like this that made me instantly dislike Sam Harris. Of all the Four Horsemen, he was the only one that I instantly, irrevocably loathed. Dennett I found to be an amiable but well-meaning sort, Hitchens was problematic but could have witty and devastating insights when he wasn’t determined to be a total prick, and Dawkins seemed to be an intelligent and compassionate person with a sense of moral integrity. I could see certain problems with him even then, but thought that he had the moral integrity to challenge himself and find his way past them. That’s turned out not to be true.

But Harris, even in the early chapters of his first book, flaunted authoritarian and racist tendencies that just made me want to distance myself from him as quickly as possible. This is an excellent example of why.

Terry and Harris may think that context somehow changes the meaning of the line, but all it does is expound further on the original theme. Harris really does think that it’s perfectly ethical to kill people for what they think, not what they’ve done or are about to do.

Harris repeatedly finds himself using the “out of context” excuse, trying to explain that the words on the page don’t actually mean what they say. It’s been a theme in his career ever since he started to make a splash in the media. In this case, the only thing I can figure is that he expects that the original context means people that we see as “other.” By conjuring up the specter of ISIL/ISIS, he wants his readers to understand that he’s only in favor of killing people that we’ve already decided are okay to kill:

The flag of ISIL/ISIS

The larger context of this passage is a philosophical and psychological analysis of belief as an engine of behavior—and the link to behavior is the whole point of the discussion. Why would it be ethical to drop a bomb on the leaders of ISIS at this moment? Because of all the harm they’ve caused? No. Killing them will do nothing to alleviate that harm. It would be ethical to kill these men—once again, only if we couldn’t capture them—because of all the death and suffering they intend to cause in the future. Why do they intend this? Because of what they believe about infidels, apostates, women, paradise, prophecy, America, and so forth.

Notice how he’s changing the rules here: This doesn’t say the same thing as the original line. Here, the action that he’s advocating is only about ideas at the most abstract level. In practice, it’s about defending yourself or someone else against an imminent, physical threat, not an idea.

Sam Harris can rest assured that although I think he’s an asshole with dangerous ideas, I’m not going to advocate killing him for them. It’s too bad that he can’t write clearly enough to reassure other people of the same thing.

-30-

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Filed Under: Atheism, Featured, Politics Tagged With: authoritarian, racism, Sam-Harris, Terry Firma

Would You Ask Me to Guard Your Computer?

By Chris Hall
August 30, 2013
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Photo Booth - Self Portrait

Do you want this person guarding your laptop?

I keep wondering why the hell people in coffee shops look at me and decide that I’m just the kind of guy that they should ask to guard their expensive computer hardware while they go take a poop. I have that kind of sullen, brooding look that should rightly be associated more with the leader of the Satanic cult that moved in down the street just before all the dogs and cats started disappearing from the neighborhood. Not the all-American boy who would never think of walking your precious laptop down to the pawn store and hocking it. [Read more…]

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Filed Under: Personal Life, Politics, Racism Tagged With: racism, rants, white privilege

Listening to Anger: Two Good Responses to JT Eberhard and Atheist Racism

By Chris Hall
August 26, 2013
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I can’t even say how deeply disappointed I am in JT Eberhard’s recent behavior on the subject of racism. But even more, I’m disappointed in the failure of the atheist community to address it better.

Bria Crutchfield

Bria Crutchfield

Actually, some prominent atheists have addressed it very well: Jen McCreight and Greta Christina articulated the problems with JT’s comments about Bria Crutchfield and his defense of those comments beautifully. The fact that Jen, a white feminist, was one of the first people to speak up gave me some initial optimism; when white people create a mess, white people should be first on the scene to clean it up. It should not constantly be up to people of color to explain what’s so fucked up about racism. [Read more…]

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Filed Under: Atheism, Politics, Racism Tagged With: Atheism, JT Eberhard, racism

Sign Adam Lee’s Petition, Expand Atheism

By Chris Hall
January 14, 2013
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Ayn Rand picture with signature

Ayn Rand: The woman who made it hip to be a selfish asshole.

Here’s words you won’t see me write (or hear me say) very often: sign this online petition. Generally, I think that online petitions and surveys are naught but meaningless wankery, but this one I think can do some good. One of the problems I have with online petitions is that they seem to take on Grand, Important Problems by allowing you to do nothing more than click a link. Adam Lee’s petition, on the other hand, is very specific about who it’s talking to, and what it’s talking about:

We support making the atheist movement more diverse and inclusive. It’s long been clear that the skeptical movement has a preponderance of white men. While we don’t disdain their participation, we believe skepticism is valuable and important to people in all walks of life, and in accordance with that principle, we consider it vital to have a movement that reflects the demographics of the society we live in. If our community continues to be dominated by white men, it will become increasingly out-of-touch and irrelevant as Western society becomes increasingly multiracial and multicultural and as non-Western countries gain economic and cultural power.

To that end, we urge the atheist and skeptical organizations to make a conscious commitment to diversity: to intentionally reach out to people of all ages, genders and ethnic backgrounds to speak at our conventions, to serve on our boards of directors, and to be the public faces and representatives of skepticism. We believe that there are talented, dedicated and eminently qualified people of every gender and every race, and that seeking them out will strengthen our movement and broaden its appeal.

[Read more…]

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Filed Under: Atheism, Feminism, Politics Tagged With: Atheism, feminism, godlessness, justice, misogyny, racism

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