Caltrops - Motherfucking News





	[quote name="Zseni"]<a href="http://www.alternet.org/story/46196/">Giddily laced with more incendiary material than Troll Police, this article</a> is just a review of one man's one-man crusade against something or another. "I wanted to interview Harris to find out why a man sold to the American public as the voice of scientific reason is promoting Hindu gods and mind reading in his writing. But we spend much of our time discussing his call for torture and his Buddhist perspectives on "compassionately killing the bad guy." ... Harris, however, argues that not just Western gods but philosophers are "dwarfs" next to the Buddhas. And a Harris passage on psychics recommends that curious readers spend time with the study "20 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation." ... "Most scientists would say this doesn't happen. Most would say that if it does happen, it's a case of fraud. ... It's hard to see why anyone would be perpetrating a fraud -- everyone was made miserable by this [xenoglossy] phenomenon." Pressed, he admits that some of the details might after all be "fishy." ... "[M]ysticism is a rational enterprise," he writes in his book, arguing it lets spiritualists "uncover genuine facts about the world." ... Like any religious moderate, he has picked and chosen what he likes from a religion. On the one hand, there's an obligatory swipe in "The End of Faith" against Pakistan and India for threatening to nuke each other over "fanciful" religious disputes. ... [on the other hand] "For thousands of years, "personal transformation [...] seems to have been thought too much to ask" of Western philosophers, he complains petulantly, as if finding the entire Enlightenment short on self-help tips. <i>[Zseni notes: I LOVE this author, who gets in nasty little digs at all kinds of people in the process of his write-up. The article is a treat. You should read the whole thing.]</i> ... [Zseni notes: tender readers, turn away; there is a dreadful gay circle jerk in the next quote.] Though it lapses in skepticism, Harris's work has won a surprising following among nonmystics. Times science writer Natalie Angier felt "vindicated, almost personally understood" reading it, she wrote in a review. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has practically adopted Harris as the American Robin to his Batman in confronting unreason wherever it may lurk in the hearts of men. "The End of Faith" should "replace the Gideon Bible in every hotel room in the land," blurbs Dawkins. ... When that happens, Muslims will check into the Best Western and find a text cheering their torture. [...] "They're not talking," Harris is telling me, imagining a torture scenario where the captives clam up, "quite amused at our unwillingness to make them uncomfortable." [...] "We should say we don't do it," Harris says of torture. "We should say it's reprehensible." And then do it anyway, he says.[/quote]