Podcasts about maajid

Maajid Nawaz is a prominent counter-extremism activist, author, and former Islamist who has dedicated his life to combating radicalization.  In this episode, we discuss the complexities of modern Britain, the rise of extremism, the impact of divisive rhetoric, and the urgent need to rebuild societal trust. Maajid shares his insights on the weaponization of free speech, the failures of political leadership, and the challenges of integration and identity in a rapidly changing UK. We also get into his personal journey from radicalism to reform, the importance of shared values, and his vision for a new Britain.  

www.goodluckgabe.life    The Perils of Audience Capture How influencers become brainwashed by their audiences The Man Who Ate Himself In 2016, 24 year old Nicholas Perry wanted to be big online. He started uploading videos to his YouTube channel in which he pursued his passion—playing the violin—and extolled the virtues of veganism. He went largely unnoticed.   A year later, he abandoned veganism, citing health concerns. Now free to eat whatever he wanted, he began uploading mukbang videos of himself consuming various dishes while talking to the camera, as if having dinner with a friend.   These new videos quickly found a sizable audience, but as the audience grew, so did their demands. The comments sections of the videos soon became filled with people challenging Perry to eat as much as he physically could. Eager to please, he began to set himself torturous eating challenges, each bigger than the last. His audience applauded, but always demanded more. Soon, he was filming himself eating entire menus of fast food restaurants in one sitting.   In some respects, all his eating paid off; Nikocado Avocado, as Perry is now better known, has amassed over six million subscribers across six channels on YouTube. By satisfying the escalating demands of his audience, he got his wish of blowing up and being big online. But the cost was that he blew up and became big in ways he hadn't anticipated. Top: Nicholas Perry when he first started making mukbang videos. Bottom: Perry transformed by his audience's desires into Nikocado. Nikocado, moulded by his audience's desires into a cartoonish extreme, is now a wholly different character from Nicholas Perry, the vegan violinist who first started making videos. Where Perry was mild-mannered and health conscious, Nikocado is loud, abrasive, and spectacularly grotesque. Where Perry was a picky eater, Nikocado devoured everything he could, including finally Perry himself. The rampant appetite for attention caused the person to be subsumed by the persona.   We often talk of "captive audiences," regarding the performer as hypnotizing their viewers. But just as often, it's the viewers hypnotizing the performer. This disease, of which Perry is but one victim of many, is known as audience capture, and it's essential to understanding influencers in particular and the online ecosystem in general.   Lost in the Looking Glass Audience capture is an irresistible force in the world of influencing, because it's not just a conscious process but also an unconscious one. While it may ostensibly appear to be a simple case of influencers making a business decision to create more of the content they believe audiences want, and then being incentivized by engagement numbers to remain in this niche forever, it's actually deeper than that. It involves the gradual and unwitting replacement of a person's identity with one custom-made for the audience.   To understand how, we must consider how people come to define themselves. A person's identity is being constantly refined, so it needs constant feedback. That feedback typically comes from other people, not so much by what they say they see as by what we think they see. We develop our personalities by imagining ourselves through others' eyes, using their borrowed gazes like mirrors to dress ourselves.   Just as lacking a mirror to dress ourselves leaves us disheveled, so lacking other people's eyes to refine our personalities leaves us uncouth. This is why those raised in isolation, like poor Genie, become feral humans, adopting the character of beasts.   Put simply, in order to be someone, we need someone to be someone for. Our personalities develop as a role we perform for other people, fulfilling the expectations we think they have of us. The American sociologist Charles Cooley dubbed this phenomenon “the looking glass self.” Evidence for it is diverse, and includes the everyday experience of seeing ourselves through imagined eyes in social situations (the spotlight effect), the tendency for people to alter their behavior when in the presence of pictures of eyes (the watching-eye effect), and the tendency for people in virtual spaces to adopt the traits of their avatars in an attempt to fulfill expectations (the Proteus effect).   When we lived in small tight-knit communities, the looking glass self helped us to become the people our loved ones needed us to be. The “Michelangelo phenomenon” is the name given to the semi-conscious cycle of refinement and feedback whereby lovers who genuinely care what each other think gradually grow closer to their partner's original ideal of them.   The problem is, we no longer live solely among those we know well. We're now forced to refine our personalities by the countless eyes of strangers. And this has begun to affect the process by which we develop our identities.   Gradually we're all gaining online audiences, and we don't really know these people. We can only gauge who they are by what some of them post online, and what people post online is not indicative of who they really are. As such, the people we're increasingly becoming someone for are an abstract illusion.   When influencers are analyzing audience feedback, they often find that their more outlandish behavior receives the most attention and approval, which leads them to recalibrate their personalities according to far more extreme social cues than those they'd receive in real life. In doing this they exaggerate the more idiosyncratic facets of their personalities, becoming crude caricatures of themselves.   The caricature quickly becomes the influencer's distinct brand, and all subsequent attempts by the influencer to remain on-brand and fulfill audience expectations require them to act like the caricature. As the caricature becomes more familiar than the person, both to the audience and to the influencer, it comes to be regarded by both as the only honest expression of the influencer, so that any deviation from it soon looks and feels inauthentic. At that point the persona has eclipsed the person, and the audience has captured the influencer.   The old Greek legends tell of Narcissus, a youth so handsome he became besotted by his own reflection. Unable to look away from his image in the surface of the waters, he fell still forever, and was transformed by the gods into a flower. Similarly, as influencers glimpse their idealized online personas reflected back at them on screens, they too are in danger of becoming eternally besotted by how they appear, and in so doing, forgetting who they were, or could be.   III. The Prostitution of the Intellect Audience capture is a particular problem in politics, due to both phenomena being driven by popular approval. On Twitter I've watched many political influencers gradually become radicalized by their audiences, starting off moderate but following their increasingly extreme followers toward the fringes.   One example is Louise Mensch, a once-respectable journalist and former Conservative politician who in 2016 published a story about Trump's alleged ties to Russia, which went viral. She subsequently gained a huge audience of #NotMyPresident #Resist types, and, encouraged by her new, indignant audience to uncover more evidence of Trump's corruption, she appears to have begun to view herself as the one who'd prove Russiagate and bring down the Donald. The immense responsibility she felt to her audience seems to have motivated her to see dramatic patterns in pure noise, and to concoct increasingly speculative conspiracy theories about Trump and Russia, such as the claim that Vladimir Putin assassinated Andrew Breitbart, the founder of Breitbart News, so his job would go to Trump ally Steve Bannon. When her former allies, such as the hacker known as "the Jester," expressed concern over her new trajectory toward fringe theories, she doubled down, accusing all her critics of being Trump shills or Putin shills.   Another, more recent victim of audience capture is Maajid Nawaz. I've always liked Maajid, and as someone who once worked with the organization he founded, the counter terrorism think-tank Quilliam, I'm aware of how careful and considered he can be. Unfortunately, since the pandemic, he's been different. His descent began with him posting a few vague theories about the virus being a fraud perpetrated on an unsuspecting public, and after his posts went viral he found himself being inundated with new "Covid-skeptic" followers, who showered him with new leads to chase.   In January, after he lost his position at the radio show LBC due to his increasingly careless theories about a secretive New World Order, he implied his firing was part of the conspiracy to silence the truth, and urged his loyal followers to subscribe to his Substack, as this was now his family's only source of income. His new audience proved to be generous with both money and attention, and his need to meet their expectations seems to have spurred him, consciously or unconsciously, to double down on his more extreme views. Now almost everything he writes about, from Covid to Ukraine, he somehow ties to the shadowy New World Order.   Motivated by his audience to continually uncover new truths about the conspiracy, Maajid has been forced to scrape the barrel of claims. His recent work is his wildest yet, combining common tropes like resurrected Nazi eugenics programs, satanic rituals, and the Bilderberg meeting. Among the fields he now relies on for his evidence are... numerology.   Twitter avatar for @MaajidNawaz Maajid أبو عمّار  @MaajidNawaz British MPs have begun voting on a motion of ‘no confidence' in the UK Parliament against Prime Minister Johnson.    The vote commenced at:   6pm, on the 6th day, of the 6th month.    No joke.    آل عمران:[54] وَمَكَرُوا وَمَكَرَ اللَّهُ وَاللَّهُ خَيْرُ الْمَاكِرِينَ  Twitter avatar for @MaajidNawaz Maajid أبو عمّار  @MaajidNawaz 3 of our British MPs were at this dodgy af global Bilderberg meeting:   Michael Gove (con) Tom Tugendhat (con) David Lammy (lab)   Their attendance alone must be remembered if they ever seek leadership of their respective political parties and hence try to become PM of Britain https://t.co/EKohVzfaiN 6:52 PM ∙ Jun 6, 2022 957 Likes 287 Retweets There is clear value in investigating the corruption that pervades the misty pinnacles of power, but by defining himself by his audience's view of him as the uncoverer of a global conspiracy, Maajid has ensured he'll see evidence of the conspiracy in all things. Instead of performing real investigation, he is now merely playing the role of investigator for his audience, a role that requires drama rather than diligence, and which can lead only to his audience's desired conclusions.   Muddying the Waters to Obscure the Reflection Maajid, Mensch, and Perry are far from the only victims of audience capture. Given how fundamental the looking glass self is to the development of our personalities, every influencer has likely been affected by it to some degree. And that includes me.   I'm no authority on the degree to which my mind has been captured by you, my audience. But I do suspect that audience capture affects me far less than most influencers because I've taken specific steps to avoid it. I was aware of the pitfall long before I became an influencer. I wanted an audience, but I also knew that having the wrong audience would be worse than having no audience, because they'd constrain me with their expectations, forcing me to focus on one tiny niche of my worldview at the expense of everything else, until I became a parody of myself.   It was clear to me that the only way to resist becoming what other people wanted me to be was to have a strong sense of who I wanted to be. And who I wanted to be was someone immune to audience capture, someone who thinks his own thoughts, decides his own destiny, and above all, never stops growing.   I knew there were limits to my desired independence, because, whether we like it or not, we all become like the people we surround ourselves with. So I surrounded myself with the people I wanted to be like. On Twitter I cultivated a reasonable, open-minded audience by posting reasonable, open-minded tweets. The biggest jumps in my follower count came from my megathreads of mental models, which cover so many topics from so many perspectives that the people who appreciated them enough to follow me would need to be willing to consider new perspectives. Naturally these people came to view me as, and expected me to be, an independent thinker as open to learning and growing as themselves.   In this way I ensured that my brand image—the person that my audience expects me to be—was in alignment with my ideal image—the person I want to be. So even though audience capture likely does affect me in some way, it only makes me more like the person I want to be. I hacked the system.   My brand image is, admittedly, diffuse and weak. My Twitter bio is “saboteur of narratives,” and few people can say for sure what I'm about, other than vague things like “thinker” or “dumb fuck.” And that's how I like it. My vagueness makes me hard to pigeonhole, predict, and capture.   For this same reason, I'm suspicious of those with strong, sharply delineated brands. Human beings are capricious and largely formless storms of idiosyncrasies, so a human only develops a clear and distinct identity through the artifice of performance.   Nikocado has a clear and distinct identity, but its clarity and distinctness make it hard to escape. He may be a millionaire with legions of fans, but his videos, filled with complaints-disguised-as-jokes about his poor health, hardly make him seem happy.   Unfortunately, salvation seems out of reach for him because his audience, or at least the audience he imagines, demands he be the same as he was yesterday. And even if he were to find the strength to break character and be himself again, he's been acting for so long that stopping would only make him feel like an imposter.   This is the ultimate trapdoor in the hall of fame; to become a prisoner of one's own persona. The desire for recognition in an increasingly atomized world lures us to be who strangers wish us to be. And with personal development so arduous and lonely, there is ease and comfort in crowdsourcing your identity. But amid such temptations, it's worth remembering that when you become who your audience expects at the expense of who you are, the affection you receive is not intended for you but for the character you're playing, a character you'll eventually tire of. So the next time you find yourself in the limelight of other people's gazes, remember that being someone often means being fake, and if you chase the approval of others, you may, in the end, lose the approval of yourself TikTok is a Time Bomb The ultimate weapon of mass distraction   For thousands of years, humans sought to subjugate their enemies by inflicting pain, misery, and terror. They did this because these were the most paralyzing emotions they could consistently evoke; all it took was the slash of a sword or pull of a trigger. But as our understanding of psychology has developed, so it has become easier to evoke other emotions in complete strangers. Advances in the understanding of positive reinforcement, driven mostly by people trying to get us to click on links, have now made it possible to consistently give people on the other side of the world dopamine hits at scale. As such, pleasure is now a weapon; a way to incapacitate an enemy as surely as does pain. And the first pleasure-weapon of mass destruction may just be a little app on your phone called TikTok. I. The Smiling Tiger TikTok is the most successful app in history. It emerged in 2017 out of the Chinese video-sharing app Douyin and within three years it had become the most downloaded app in the world, later surpassing Google as the world's most visited web domain. TikTok's conquest of human attention was facilitated by the covid lockdowns of 2020, but its success wasn't mere luck. There's something about the design of the app that makes it unusually irresistible. Other platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, use recommendation algorithms as features to enhance the core product. With TikTok, the recommendation algorithm is the core product. You don't need to form a social network or list your interests for the platform to begin tailoring content to your desires, you just start watching, skipping any videos that don't immediately draw your interest. Tiktok uses a proprietary algorithm, known simply as the For You algorithm, that uses machine learning to build a personality profile of you by training itself on your watch habits (and possibly your facial expressions.) Since a TikTok video is generally much shorter than, say, a YouTube video, the algorithm acquires training data from you at a much faster rate, allowing it to quickly zero in on you. The result is a system that's unsurpassed at figuring you out. And once it's figured you out, it can then show you what it needs to in order to addict you. Since the For You algorithm favors only the most instantly mesmerizing content, its constructive videos—such as “how to” guides and field journalism—tend to be relegated to the fringes in favor of tasty but malignant junk info. Many of the most popular TikTokers, such as Charli D'Amelio, Bella Poarch, and Addison Rae, do little more than vapidly dance and lip-sync. Individually, such videos are harmless, but the algorithm doesn't intend to show you just one. When it receives the signal that it's got your attention, it doubles down on whatever it did to get it. This allows it to feed your obsessions, showing you hypnotic content again and again, reinforcing its imprint on your brain. This content can include promotion of self-harm and eating disorders, and uncritical encouragement of sex-reassignment surgery. There's evidence that watching such content can cause mass psychogenic illness: researchers recently identified a new phenomenon where otherwise healthy young girls who watched clips of Tourette's sufferers developed Tourette's-like tics. A more common way TikTok promotes irrational behavior is with viral trends and “challenges,” where people engage in a specific act of idiocy in the hope it'll make them TikTok-famous. Acts include licking toilets, snorting suntan lotion, eating chicken cooked in NyQuil, and stealing cars. One challenge, known as “devious licks”, encourages kids to vandalize property, while the “blackout challenge,” in which kids purposefully choke themselves with household items, has even led to several deaths, including a little girl a few days ago.   As troublesome as TikTok's trends are, the app's greatest danger lies not in any specific content but in its general addictive nature. Studies on long term TikTok addiction don't yet exist for obvious reasons, but, based on what we know of internet addiction generally, we can extrapolate its eventual effects on habitual TikTokers. There's a substantial body of research showing a strong association between smartphone addiction, shrinkage of the brain's gray matter, and “digital dementia,” an umbrella term for the onset of anxiety and depression and the deterioration of memory, attention span, self-esteem, and impulse control (the last of which increases the addiction). These are the problems caused by internet addiction generally. But there's something about TikTok that makes it uniquely dangerous. In order to develop and maintain mental faculties like memory and attention span, one needs to practice using them. TikTok, more than any other app, is designed to give you what you want while requiring you to do as little as possible. It cares little who you follow or what buttons you click; its main consideration is how long you spend watching. Its reliance on machine learning rather than user input, combined with the fact that TikTok clips are so short they require minimal memory and attention span, makes browsing TikTok the most passive, uninteractive experience of all major platforms. If it's the passive nature of online content consumption that causes atrophy of mental faculties, then TikTok, as the most passively used platform, will naturally cause the most atrophy. Indeed many habitual TikTokers can already be found complaining on websites like Reddit about their loss of mental ability, a phenomenon that's come to be known as “TikTok brain.” If the signs are becoming apparent already, imagine what TikTok addiction will have done to young developing brains a decade from now. TikTok's capacity to stupefy people, both acutely by encouraging idiotic behavior, and chronically by atrophying the brain, should prompt consideration of its potential use as a new kind of weapon, one that seeks to neutralize enemies not by inflicting pain and terror, but by inflicting pleasure. Last month FBI Director Chris Wray warned that TikTok is controlled by a Chinese government that could “use it for influence operations.” So how likely is it that one such influence operation might include addicting young Westerners to mind-numbing content to create a generation of nincompoops? The first indication that the Chinese Communist Party is aware of TikTok's malign influence on kids is that it's forbidden access of the app to Chinese kids. The American tech ethicist Tristan Harris pointed out that the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, is a “spinach” version where kids don't see twerkers and toilet-lickers but science experiments and educational videos. Furthermore, Douyin is only accessible to kids for 40 minutes per day, and it cannot be accessed between 10pm and 6am. Has the CCP enforced such rules to protect its people from what it intends to inflict on the West? When one examines the philosophical doctrines behind the rules, it becomes clear that the CCP doesn't just believe that apps like TikTok make people stupid, but that they destroy civilizations. II. Seven Mouths, Eight Tongues China has been suspicious of Western liberal capitalism since the 1800s, when the country's initial openness led to the Western powers flooding China with opium. The epidemic of addiction, combined with the ensuing Opium Wars, accelerated the fall of the Qing Dynasty and led to the Century of Humiliation in which China was subject to harsh and unequal terms by Britain and the US. Mao is credited with eventually crushing the opium epidemic, and since then the view among many in China has been that Western liberalism leads to decadence and that authoritarianism is the cure. But one man has done more than anyone to turn this thesis into policy. His name is Wang Huning, and, despite not being well known outside China, he has been China's top ideological theorist for three decades, and he is now member number 4 of the seven-man Standing Committee—China's most powerful body. He advised China's former leaders Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, and now he advises Xi Jinping, authoring many of his policies. In China he is called “guoshi” (国师: literally, “teacher of the nation”).   Wang refuses to do press or to even speak with foreigners, but his worldview can be surmised from the books he wrote earlier in his life. In August 1988, Wang accepted an invitation to spend six months in the US, and traveled from state to state noting the way American society operates, examining its strengths and weaknesses. He recorded his findings in the 1991 book, America Against America, which has since become a key CCP text for understanding the US. The premise of the book is simple: the US is a paradox composed of contradictions: its two primary values—freedom and equality—are mutually exclusive. It has many different cultures, and therefore no overall culture. And its market-driven society has given it economic riches but spiritual poverty. As he writes in the book, “American institutions, culture and values oppose the United States itself.” For Wang, the US's contradictions stem from one source: nihilism. The country has become severed from its traditions and is so individualistic it can't make up its mind what it as a nation believes. Without an overarching culture maintaining its values, the government's regulatory powers are weak, easily corrupted by lobbying or paralyzed by partisan bickering. As such, the nation's progress is directed mostly by blind market forces; it obeys not a single command but a cacophony of three hundred million demands that lead it everywhere and nowhere. In Wang's view, the lack of a unifying culture puts a hard limit on the US's progress. The country is constantly producing wondrous new technologies, but these technologies have no guiding purpose other than their own proliferation. The result is that all technological advancement leads the US along one unfortunate trajectory: toward more and more commodification. Wang writes: “Human flesh, sex, knowledge, politics, power, and law can all become the target of commodification… Commodification, in many ways, corrupts society and leads to a number of serious social problems. These problems, in turn, can increase the pressure on the political and administrative system.” Thus, by turning everything into a product, Western capitalism devours every aspect of American culture, including the traditions that bind it together as a nation, leading to atomization and polarization. The commodification also devours meaning and purpose, and to plug the expanding spiritual hole that this leaves, Americans turn to momentary pleasures—drugs, fast food, and amusements—driving the nation further into decadence and decay. For Wang, then, the US's unprecedented technological progress is leading it into a chasm. Every new microchip, TV, and automobile only distracts and sedates Americans further. As Wang writes in his book, “it is not the people who master the technology, but the technology that masters the people.” Though these words are 30 years old, they could easily have been talking about social media addiction. Wang theorized that the conflict between the US's economic system and its value system made it fundamentally unstable and destined for ever more commodification, nihilism, and decadence, until it finally collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. To prevent China's own technological advancement leading it down the same perilous path, Wang proposed an extreme solution: neo-authoritarianism. In his 1988 essay, “The Structure of China's Changing Political Culture,” Wang wrote that the only way a nation can avoid the US's problems is by instilling “core values”—a national consensus of beliefs and principles rooted in the traditions of the past and directed toward a clear goal in the future. Such a consensus could eventually ward off nihilism and decadence, but cultivating it would in turn require the elimination of nihilism and decadence. This idea has been central to President Xi's governance strategy, which has emphasized “core socialist values” like civility, patriotism, and integrity. So how has the push for these socialist core values affected the CCP's approach to social media? The creator of TikTok and CEO of Bytedance, Zhang Yiming, originally intended for the content on TikTok and its Chinese version, Douyin, to be determined purely by popularity. As such, Douyin started off much like TikTok is now, with the content dominated by teenagers singing and dancing. In April 2018, the CCP began action against Zhang. Its media watchdog, the National Radio and Television Administration, ordered the removal from Chinese app stores of Bytedance's then-most popular app, Toutiao, and its AI news aggregator, Neihan Duanzi, citing their platforming of “improper” content. Zhang then took to social media to offer a groveling public apology, stating: "Our products took the wrong path, and content appeared that was incommensurate with socialist core values." Shortly after, Bytedance announced it would recruit thousands more people to moderate content, and, according to CNN, in the subsequent job ads it stated a preference for CCP members with “strong political sensitivity.” The CCP's influence over Bytedance has only grown since then. Last year, the Party acquired a “golden share” in Bytedance's Beijing entity, and one of its officials, Wu Shugang, took one of the company's three board seats. The CCP's intrusion into Bytedance's operations is part of a broader strategy by Xi, called the “Profound Transformation”, which seeks to clear space for the instituting of core socialist values by ridding China of “decadent” online content. In August 2021, a statement appeared across Chinese state media calling for an end to TikTok-style “tittytainment” for fear that “our young people will lose their strong and masculine vibes and we will collapse.” In the wake of that statement, there have been crackdowns on “sissy-men” fashions, “digital drugs” like online gaming, and “toxic idol worship.” Consequently, many online influencers have been forcibly deprived of their influence, with some, such as the movie star Zhao Wei, having their entire presence erased from the Chinse web. For Xi and the CCP, eliminating “decadent” TikTok-style content from China is a matter of survival, because such content is considered a herald of nihilism, a regression of humans back to beasts, a symptom of the West's terminal illness that must be prevented from metastasizing to China. And yet, while cracking down on this content domestically, China has continued to allow its export internationally as part of Xi's “digital Silk Road” (数字丝绸之路). TikTok is known to censor content that displeases Beijing, such as mentions of Falun Gong or Tiananmen Square, but otherwise it has free rein to show Westerners what it wants; “tittytainment” and “sissy men” are everywhere on the app. So why the hypocritical disparity in rules? Is the digital Silk Road intended as poetic justice for the original Silk Road, whereby the Western powers preached Christian values while trafficking chemical TikTok—opium—into China? Since Wang and Xi believe the West is too decadent to survive, they may have opted to take the Taoist path of wu wei (無為), which is to say, sit back and let the West's appetites take it where they will. But there's another, more sinister and effective approach they may have adopted. To understand it, we must consider one final piece of the puzzle: an amphetamine-fueled philosopher who lived in my hometown. III. The Matricide Laboratory At first glance the British philosopher Nick Land could hardly be more different from Wang Huning. Wang rose to prominence by being dour, discreet, and composed, while Land rose to prominence by ranting about cyborg apocalypses while out of his mind on weed and speed. In the late 1990s Land moved into a house once owned by the Satanist libertine Aleister Crowley (half a mile from where I grew up), and there he apparently binged on drugs and scrawled occult diagrams on the walls. At nearby Warwick University where he taught, his lectures were often bizarre (one infamous “lesson” consisted of Land lying on the floor, croaking into a mic, while frenetic jungle music pulsed in the background.)   Land and Wang were not just polar opposites in personality; they also operated at opposite ends of the political spectrum. While Wang would go on to be the top ideological theorist of the Chinese Communist Party, Land would become the top theorist (with Curtis Yarvin) of the influential network of far-right bloggers, NRx. And yet, despite their opposite natures, Land and Wang would develop almost identical visions of liberal capitalism as an all-commodifying, all devouring force, driven by the insatiable hunger of blind market forces, and destined to finally eat Western civilization itself. Land viewed Western liberal capitalism as a kind of AI that's reached the singularity; in other words, an AI that's grown beyond the control of humans and is now unstoppably accelerating toward inhuman ends. As Land feverishly wrote in his 1995 essay, “Meltdown:” “The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway.” Land's drug-fueled prose is overwrought, so to simplify his point, Western capitalism can be compared to a “paperclip maximizer,” a hypothetical AI programmed by a paperclip business to produce as many paperclips as possible, which leads it to begin recycling everything on earth into paperclips (commodities). When the programmers panic and try to switch it off, the AI turns them into paperclips, since being switched off would stop it fulfilling its goal of creating as many paperclips as possible. Thus, the blind application of short term goals leads to long term ruin. Land believed that, since the runaway AI we call liberal capitalism commodifies everything, including even criticisms of it (which are necessarily published for profit), it cannot be opposed. Every attack on it becomes part of it. Thus, if one wishes to change it, the only way is to accelerate it along its trajectory. As Land stated in a later, more sober writing style: “The point of an analysis of capitalism, or of nihilism, is to do more of it. The process is not to be critiqued. The process is the critique, feeding back into itself, as it escalates. The only way forward is through, which means further in.” —A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism (2017) This view, that the current system must be accelerated to be transformed, has since become known as “accelerationism.” For Land, acceleration is not just a destructive force but also a creative one; he came to believe that all democracies accelerate toward ruin but a visionary despot unfettered by the concerns of the masses could accelerate a country to prosperity. Land's own life followed the same course he envisioned for the liberal West; following years of high productivity, he fell into nihilism and the decadence of rampant drug use, which drove him to a nervous breakdown. Upon recovering in 2002, he embraced authoritarianism, moved to Shanghai, and began writing for Chinese state media outlets like China Daily and the Shanghai Star. A few years after Land moved to China, talk of accelerationism began to emerge on the Chinese web, where it's become known by its Chinese name, jiasuzhuyi (加速主义). The term has caught on among Chinese democracy advocates, many of whom view the CCP as the runaway AI, hurtling toward greater tyranny; they even refer to Xi as “Accelerator-in-Chief” (总加速师). Domestically, Chinese democracy activists try to accelerate the CCP's authoritarianism ad absurdum; one tactic is to swamp official tip-off lines with reports of minor or made-up infractions, with the intent of breaking the Party by forcing it to enforce all of its own petty rules. As for the CCP itself, it's known to have viewed former US president Donald Trump as the “Accelerator-in-Chief,” or, more accurately, “Chuan Jianguo” (川建国: literally “Build China Trump”) because he was perceived as helping China by accelerating the West's decline. For this reason, support of him was encouraged. The CCP is also known to have engaged in jiasuzhuyi more directly; for instance, during the 2020 US race riots, China used Western social media platforms to douse accelerant over US racial tensions. But the use of TikTok as an accelerant is a whole new scale of accelerationism, one much closer to Land's original, apocalyptic vision. Liberal capitalism is about making people work in order to obtain pleasurable things, and for decades it's been moving toward shortening the delay between desire and gratification, because that's what consumers want. Over the past century the market has taken us toward ever shorter-form entertainment, from cinema in the early 1900s, to TV mid-century, to minutes-long YouTube videos, to seconds-long TikTok clips. With TikTok the delay between desire and gratification is almost instant; there's no longer any patience or effort needed to obtain the reward, so our mental faculties fall into disuse and disrepair. And this is why TikTok could prove such a devastating geopolitical weapon. Slowly but steadily it could turn the West's youth—its future—into perpetually distracted dopamine junkies ill-equipped to maintain the civilization built by their ancestors. We seem to be halfway there already: not only has there been gray matter shrinkage in smartphone-addicted individuals, but, since 1970 the Western average IQ has been steadily falling. Though the decline likely has several causes, it began with the first generation to grow up with widespread TVs in homes, and common sense suggests it's at least partly the result of technology making the attainment of satisfaction increasingly effortless, so that we spend ever more of our time in a passive, vegetative state. If you don't use it, you lose it. And even those still willing to use their brains are at risk of having their efforts foiled by social media, which seems to be affecting not just kids' abilities but also their aspirations; in a survey asking American and Chinese children what job they most wanted, the top answer among Chinese kids was “astronaut,” and the top answer among American kids was “influencer.” If we continue along our present course, the resulting loss of brainpower in key fields could, years from now, begin to harm the West economically. But, more importantly, if it did it would help discredit the very notion of Western liberalism itself, since there is no greater counterargument to a system than to see it destroy itself. And so the CCP would benefit doubly from this outcome: ruin the West and refute it; two birds with one stone (or as they say in China, 箭双雕: one arrow, two eagles.) So, the CCP has both the means and the motive to help the West defeat itself, and part of this could conceivably involve the use of TikTok to accelerate liberal capitalism by closing the gap between desire and gratification. Now, it could be argued that we have no hard evidence of the CCP's intentions, only a set of indications. However, ultimately the CCP's intentions are irrelevant. Accelerationism can't alter an outcome, only hasten it. And TikTok, whether or not it's actively intended as a weapon, is only moving the West further along the course it's long been headed: toward more effortless pleasure, and resulting cognitive decline. The problem, therefore, is not China, but us. America Against America. If TikTok is not a murder weapon, then it's a suicide weapon. China has given the West the means to kill itself, but the death wish is wholly the West's. After all, TikTok dominated our culture as a result of free market forces—the very thing we live by. Land and Wang are correct that the West being controlled by everyone means it's controlled by no one, and without brakes or a steering wheel we're at the market's mercy. Of course, democracies do have some regulatory power. Indian lawmakers banned TikTok in 2020, and US lawmakers are now considering the same. However, while this may stop the theft of our data, it won't stop the theft of our attention; if TikTok is banned then another short-form video site will just take its place. Effortless dopamine hits are what consumers want, and capitalism always tries to give consumers what they want. Anticipating the demand, YouTube has added its own TikTok-style “YouTube Shorts” format, and Twitter recently implemented its own version of TikTok's For You algorithm. The market is a greater accelerator than China could ever hope to be. So what's the solution? Land and Wang may be right about the illness, but they're wrong about the cure. It's true that we in the West have little left of the traditions that once tied us together, and in their absence all that unites us are our animal hungers. But Wang's belief that meaning and purpose can be miraculously imposed on us all by a strongman leader is just a fantasy that has littered history with failed experiments. Sure, democracies are vulnerable because there's no one controlling their advancement, but autocracies are vulnerable precisely for the opposite reason: they're controlled by people, which is to say, by woefully myopic apes. China is currently suffering from the myopia of Xi's zero-covid policy, which has ravaged the country's economy, and from the disastrous one-child policy that's led to China's current population crisis. For all our problems, we'd be unwise to exchange the soft tyranny of dopamine for the hard tyranny of despots. That leaves only one solution: the democratic one. In a democracy responsibility is also democratized, so parents must look out for their own kids. There's a market for this, too: various brands of parental controls can be set on devices to limit kids' access (though many of these, including TikTok's own controls, can be easily bypassed.) But ultimately these are short term measures. In the long term the only way to prevent digital dementia is to raise awareness of the neurological ruin wrought by apps like TikTok, exposing their ugliness so they fall out of fashion like cigarettes. If the weakness of liberalism is its openness, then this is also its strength; word can travel far in democracies. We'll surely sound like alarmists; TikTok destroys so gradually that it seems harmless. But if the app is a time-bomb that'll wreck a whole generation years from now, then we can't wait till its effects are apparent before acting, for then it will be too late. The clock is ticking. Tik. Tok…   I just shit and cum. FAQ What does this mean? The amount of shit (and cum) on my computer and floor has increased by one. Why did you do this? There are several reasons I may deem a comment to be worthy of feces or ejaculation. These include, but are not limited to: Being gay Dank copypasta bro, where'd you find it walter Am I going to shit and cum too? No - not yet. But you should refrain from shitposting and cumposting like this in the future. Otherwise I will be forced to shit and cum again, which may put your shitting and cumming privileges in jeopardy. I don't believe my comment deserved being shit and cum at. Can you un-cum it? Sure, mistakes happen. But only in exceedingly rare circumstances will I put shit back into my butt. If you would like to issue an appeal, shoot me a hot load explaining what I got wrong. I tend to respond to retaliatory ejaculation within several minutes. Do note, however, that over 99.9% of semen dies before it can fertilize the egg, and yours is likely no exception. How can I prevent this from happening in the future? Accept the goopy brown and white substance and move on. But learn from this mistake: your behavior will not be tolerated in my mom's basement. I will continue to shit and cum until you improve your conduct. Remember: ejaculation is privilege, not a right.   I just came in your asshole. I just came in your asshole. FAQ What does this mean? A large load of baby gravy has been transferred from my testicles into your rectum. Why did I do this? There are several reasons why I came in your ass. These include, but are not limited to: Your comment turned me on You are cute Your dad was too busy How did I do this? I rammed your rectum with my handsome hog until I turned you into a frosting factory. Why am I telling you about this? Your ass will be leaking cum for at least 36 hours and may be a slipping hazard. Also you might be gay. How can you avoid this in the future? Unless you stop looking so breedable in the near future, you can't. I will always find a way to fill your tight little boyhole

This week on Monday with Matt - Matt Enns and myself discuss: - A recent debate between Maajid Nawaz and Sam Harris - The growing confrontation of expanding gender ideologies in the western world and - The momentum of progressive cultural deconstructionism at this time. ----- Follow Matt Enns on Instagram at: @The_Sovereign_Man Get you copy of "Consciousness Reality & Purpose" on Amazon.com TODAY: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BS5FWLBK Subscribe to the Social Disorder Substack: https://thesocialdisorder.substack.com/ This episode is made possible by: BioPro+: https://bioproteintech.com/product/biopro-plus and DrewJitsu Online academy Sign up to get 2 week FREE to a library of over 550+ Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Technique videos taught by your host - Drew Weatherhead! Hit the link below to get started today! https://drewjitsuonline.com/join

Bret speaks with Maajid Nawaz was the founding chairman of Quilliam, a counter-extremism think tank that sought to challenge the narratives of Islamist extremists and, until January 2022, was the host of an LBC radio show on Saturdays and Sundays.https://twitter.com/MaajidNawazhttps://odysee.com/@MaajidNawaz*****Find Bret Weinstein on Twitter: @BretWeinstein, and on Patreon.https://www.patreon.com/bretweinsteinPlease subscribe to this channel for more long form content like this, and subscribe to the clips channel @DarkHorse Podcast Clips for short clips of all our podcasts:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAWCKUrmvK5F_ynBY_CMlIAAll removed videos can be found on Spotify Video and Odysee: https://open.spotify.com/show/57R7dOcs60jUfOnuNG0J1Rhttps://odysee.com/@BretWeinsteinCheck out the DHP store! Epic tabby, digital book burning, saddle up the dire wolves, and more: http://www.store.darkhorsepodcast.orgTheme Music: Thank you to Martin Molin of Wintergatan for providing us the rights to use their excellent music.*****UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, Article 6: Consent: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000212116Under-30s offered alternative to Oxford-AstraZeneca jab: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-566655170.096% fatality rate – British parliamentary record: https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2021-07-12/31381Pfizer documents on >1200 deaths in first 90 days of vaccine roll-out: https://perma.cc/6W69-9WFTRadical w/Maajid Nawaz, 6 - On Allegations of Involuntary State Euthanasia Using Midazolam: https://odysee.com/@MaajidNawaz:d/Ep6-Radical:9The faces from China's Uyghur detention camps: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/85qihtvw6e/the-faces-from-chinas-uyghur-detention-campsHillary Clinton Did It: https://www.wsj.com/articles/hillary-clinton-did-it-robby-mook-michael-sussmann-donald-trump-russia-collusion-alfa-bank-11653084709*****American Hartford Gold: Call them at 866-828-1117 or text DARKHORSE to 998899 to get started buying precious metals such as gold and silver.https://www.americanhartfordgold.com/*****Timestamps(00:00) Introduction(02:12) Maajid's vax history and Crimes against Humanity(04:35) Vax issues(09:36) War against humanity(13:25) Importance of relationship in keeping sane(14:08) Sponsor(17:28) Would Bret have predicted their alliance?(19:02) Intelligence and fear(20:50) Disappointment with Academia(24:13) They're coming for your 5-year-old(27:06) Lineage and courage(28:03) Maajid's injection site(32:02) Parents tolerating nonsense(36:38) MMR and Wakefield(39:06) Better Way Conference Debate(43:45) We're at ideological war(50:22) Radical cynicism(53:02) What is going on?(58:49) Guerilla warfare(01:01:03) Fatal flaw in people who see through the nonsense(01:01:57) Evolving myths(01:07:46) Disagreements with Jordan Peterson(01:15:04) Creating new myths(01:19:26) Doctors and pharmacist relationship(01:21:55) Friends who failed during COVID(01:36:08) The IDWSupport the show

The first ever photos of Venus' glowing surface, how lizard tails stay on, the price of sex and diamonds, the Maajid Nawaz controversy, and outlawing animal murder in shelters.FULL SCRIPTLook at the FIRST EVER visible-light photos we have of Venus' surface. Venus is covered by a thick cloud of sulfuric acid, but NASA's Parker Solar Probe managed to pierce through to show a planet SO HOT that it GLOWS, sort of like a red-hot iron. The pattern of bright and dark that you see is basically a temperature map - brighter regions are hotter and darker regions are cooler. The telescope wasn't able to take photos during Venus' day time because it's far too bright, so it took these images at night. Like this video if you're excited about NASA's next two missions, DAVINCI+ and VERITAS, heading to Venus over the next few years.Lizard tails - how do they stay on!? We all know that some lizards drop their tail as a defense mechanism, but if they can come off, how do they stay on? A recent report published in Science explains that lizard tails strike a fine balance between being too loose and too sturdy, and that this balance is maintained by a series of segments. Each segment of the tail contains eight cone-shaped muscles that function like a plug that slips into a corresponding socket. Nanopores help the plugs adhere, but not too tightly. This balance is important because having a drop-tail is a costly defense mechanism that affects a lizard's ability to run, leap, mate and escape future predators. So, it's important that the lizard abandons its limb only when necessary.Diamonds aren't forever, and neither is your love! This is the title of our Evolutionary Biology teacher, Rob Brook's latest article in Quillette. Why are humans so obsessed with big, shiny and expensive diamonds? We use them to show our love, but just like relationships, diamonds can also be damaged and destroyed. In his article, Rob shows the similarities between the exclusivity of diamonds and the exclusivity of sex. If something is deemed a precious or scarce resource, it's more expensive. But according to Rob, the price of sex is going down! As society has become more relaxed about sex, sex becomes less scarce and therefore cheaper and more accessible. If you're interested in evolutionary biology, check out our course taught by Rob at the link in our bio.Maajid Nawaz - how does his name make you feel? Think Inc. and Maajid go way back. We produced his film with Sam Harris, Islam and the Future of Tolerance - which you can find at the link in our bio - and we toured him across Australia in 2016. Maajid is a really smart guy, and while he became known for his discourse on religion, he is now associated with his criticism of vaccine mandates and big government. He recently went on the Joe Rogan Experience, where he talks about his experience of being a young radical islamist and being tortured in an Egyptian jail, amongst other topics. Some report that the podcast was removed from Spotify, apparently due to COVID misinformation. We want to know: did you listen to the podcast, and do you think it's possible to truly appreciate someone for some of their beliefs, whilst disagreeing with their other core ones?No more euthanasia in animal shelters! Euthanasia is something that happens a lot in Australia although shelters don't have to report the exact figures. Just last year there was massive outcry when Bourke Shire council euthanised 15 puppies despite at least 2 rehoming services offering to take them. Partly in response to cases like this, the NSW government recently passed a bill that would prohibit the convenient murder of animals inside shetler. It requires that councils take certain steps towards rehoming a seized or surrendered animal before euthanisation, which is something that the RSPCA and us say is a massive win for animal welfare.Ok, that's all for this week, don't forget that we've got two very interesting courses: Moral Philosophy AND Politics and Religion at Think Inc. Academy- sign up at the link in our bio. Until next time!-----Sign up to our newsletter → bit.ly/think-sign-up

More view from me on dumbed-down Canadians COVID and more

More view from me on dumbed-down Canadians COVID and more

Sam Harris probably needs no introduction in our neck of the info-sphere as he is seemingly never far from the spotlight... or the occasional controversy. We've had some nice things to say about Sam, but we've also made some harsh criticisms, particularly regarding a short episode he released which seemed to suggest it was necessary to practice introspective meditation in order to fully understand why his political and culture war views were correct. Although we've never done a ‘proper' episode on Sam, we have always stated that anyone we discuss is welcome to come on the show and discuss (or dispute) our charges – which is exactly what Sam is doing here! This interview is split into two sections. In the first, we discuss Sam's app and whether it might encourage guru dynamics and the role of meditation and (non) self-awareness in forming an accurate political outlook. We put some of our criticisms to Sam especially regarding guru dynamics, issues of introspective verification of truth claims, and the potential for abusive practices and manipulation by gurus. In the second section, we turn to some of the more controversial topics that have sprung up around Sam over the years. Sam responds to proposals that he might be as tribal as the rest of us suckers, and he defends himself against accusations that he might have selective empathy and blind spots towards the rightish side of the political spectrum. We talk about tribalism and the potential distorting effects of personal relationships, as well as anthropologists, Islamism, wokism, right-wing extremism, and how political biases manifest themselves on the left and right. Although the format is an interview, it does get quite ‘debate-y' at times. And it's probably true that we don't come to a grand reconciliation of views at the end. However, nobody storms off, so what you get is a frank and friendly but robust exchange of views. We hope you enjoy it. Links https://voidpod.com/podcasts/2020/12/10/ev-170-state-of-the-idw-with-chris-kavanagh (Embrace the Void 170: State of the IDW with Chris Kavanagh) https://stu-topia.blogspot.com/2018/10/stefan-molyneux-casts-communism-as.html (Article by Stuart Hayashi on Stefan Molyneux's views about the Holocaust) https://www.thedailybeast.com/meet-the-cult-leader-stumping-for-donald-trump (Stefan Molyneux profile on the Daily Beast) https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/douglas-murray-can-indulgent-dinner-conversation-save-our-civilisation (Our episode on Douglas Murray) https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/18-gad-saad-oh-my-gad-its-the-saadfather (Our episode on Gad Saad) https://soundcloud.com/politeconversations/episode-17-sam-harris (Polite Conversations with Eiynah 17: Sam Harris Episode) https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/01/07/trump-qanon-stop-the-steal-japan/ (Washington Post Article on Maajid's Promotion of 'Stop The Steal') https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/jan/31/lbcs-maajid-nawazs-fascination-with-conspiracies-raises-alarm (Guardian article on Maajid's growing interest in Conspiracies) https://samharris.org/podcasts/243-points-confusion/ (Making Sense 243: A Few Points of Confusion) (Sam's meditation episode) https://samharris.org/ama-answers/ask-anything-17/ (Making Sense AMA 17) (Sam's episode about debating conspiracy theorists) https://samharris.org/podcasts/225-republic-lies/ (Making Sense 225: Republic of Lies) (Sam's episode retiring from the IDW) https://www.wired.com/story/sam-harris-and-the-myth-of-perfectly-rational-thought/ (Robert Wright's article on Sam's supposed tribal biases) This Week's Sponsor Check out the sponsor of this week's episode, Ground News, and get the app at https://ground.news/gurus (ground.news/gurus). Support this podcast

Lalo Dagach is the Palestinian Chilean. His tweets are commentary on international politics, culture and religion. He was born in LA, lives in Chile and has Palestinian heritage. He's lived in Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong and has studied Film and International Politics. We covered Palestinians living in Chile and Arab populations in Chile, cancel culture and the firing of Mandalorian actress Gina Carano, big tech censorship and the banning of Trump from Twitter, Maajid Nawaz and his efforts to reform islam, and why Maajid may not be exactly what he seems, The Heaven's Gate cult, systematic abuse of women in USA gymnastics, and more topics. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/deekast/support

Sitting in for Maajid Nawaz who is on a silent hunger strike, lain delves into the debate at the centre of Maajid's absence - the plight of the Uyghur Muslims in China. With the help of guest MPs Nusrat Ghani and Tom Tugendhat, Iain discusses what is taking place in the Xinjiang province and also highlights Maajid's petition (https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/300146). In an international themed show Iain also discusses Donald Trump's stance on facemasks and the Russian's making the UK's vaccines - did they spy on us first though?

2:46 Jay’s film Islam and the Future of Tolerance 7:03 Why Jay became a documentary filmmaker 10:05 Why Jay chose to film Sam Harris & Maajid’s Nawaz’s book, Islam and the Future of Tolerance 19:01 Three different mindsets: political, philosophical, psychological 28:00 How responsible is a writer for the way in which he or she is interpreted? 38:24 Different types of Muslims 45:19 Reform versus apostasy 49:16 The problem with Islam 54:19 Who is Maajid Nawaz most skilled at reaching? 56:53 What Jay means by religion and religious ideas and why he is against them. 1:02:23 Jordan Peterson’s definition of religion 1:07:00 Finding meaning without religion 1:11:44 Finding ethics without religion 1:25:22 Creating new gods 1:33:44 Philosophy and modern life You can find out more about the documentary film Islam and the Future of Tolerance here: http://www.islamandthefutureoftolerance.com/ It is based on Sam Harris & Maajid Nawaz’s book of the same name, published in 2015. For Jay’s film Opposite Field see: http://www.opposite-field.com/ and for his film All Rise see: http://www.docnyc.net/film/all-rise/ You can follow Jay on Twitter @jay_shapiro Other references: Mike Nayna, documentary filmmaker: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzk08fzh5c_BhjQa1w35wtA Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (2004) and The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (2010) Maajid Nawaz, Radical: My Journey out of Islamist Extremism (2012) The Quilliam Foundation: https://www.quilliaminternational.com/ The Intelligence Squared debate on the topic Is Islam a Religion of Peace?, featuring Maajid Nawaz, Zeba Khan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Douglas Murray: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUGmv5TGaTc Ali Rizvi’s The Atheist Muslim: A Journey from Religion to Reason (2016) David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World (2011) Sean Carroll’s Moving Naturalism Forward conference: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/naturalism2012/ Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life (2004) Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994) Laurence Krauss, A Universe from Nothing (2012) Oliver Morton, Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet (2007) Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (2010 Noah Yuval Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011) and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016) Other people mentioned: Coleman Hughes, Jordan B. Peterson, Haras Rafiq

Moderate Muslim Maajid Nawaz takes to Twitter to point out the hypocrisy of the left when it comes to blanket blaming people of the same ideology/background of the perpetrators of horrific attacks. 

Encore release December 26, 2018. Encore release September 18, 2017. Why has the Southern Poverty Law Center placed Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Maajid Nawaz on their list of "anti-Muslim extremists"? Certainly both Ali (who was the victim of female genital mutilation and narrowly escaped an arranged marriage before making a success of herself in the Western world) and Nawaz (himself once a jihadist who spent jail time in Egypt, and who now heads a counter-extremist think-tank in the UK) have been critical of Islam, but is it fair to call them extremists in turn? Plus: Virginia pastor Terry Wayne Millender and his wife have been arrested, accused of orchestrating a $1.2 million scam that victimized members of their church. In recent years, churches have organized "Hell Houses" at Halloween. Instead of traditional scares like vampires and zombies, Hell Houses showcase sadistic fundamentalist fantasies of the horrors that await the unsaved in the afterlife. This year, a Chicago area church abandoned a plan to recreate Orlando's Pulse nightclub massacre (which took the lives of 49 LGBT victims) as part of their annual Hell House. The key word here is "abandoned"--but it's pretty disturbing that a church would think of doing such a thing, even going so far as to put out an ad for actors to play the victims. The 2016 election will be over soon, and Republican candidate Donald Trump is widely expected to lose. Most analysts and consultants expect the GOP to face an "existential crisis," an epic tug-o-war between the more traditional leadership (the mundane pro-business foreign policy hawks who would ordinarily be happy to compromise with the Democrats so both sides can win something) and the rabid "base" who are so desperate to burn "the system" to the ground they were willing to vote for Donald Trump. Grab the popcorn.

The riveting and illuminating documentary, Islam and the Future of Tolerance follows prominent atheist philosopher Sam Harris and Islamist-turned-liberal-Muslim Maajid Nawaz, after publicly clashing in a debate over the concept of Islamic reform in the Muslim world. The two men reconnect several years later in an attempt at civil and honest dialogue. Sam and Maajid attempt to explore their real or imagined divides by clearly and rationally dissecting their disagreements. Through the course of their discussions, they tackle troubling passages from the Quran, the importance of the precision of language and terms (such as “Jihadism,” “Islamists,” and “radical,”) and the difficulty in finding helpful and honest responses in a fraught political terrain. Ultimately, this unlikely collaboration sheds light on the many confusions that afflict the public conversation about Islam and emphasizes how the virtues of open dialogue can help foster both understanding and tolerance in an increasingly polarized world. Sam Harris entered life as a public intellectual after 9/11 and soon found himself regardedas a leading voice of the “New Atheist” movement, along with Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett. He spent much of the next decade writing books such as The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation,and The Moral Landscape and publicly engaging religious scholars and apologists in highly contentious conversations. Maajid Nawaz was arrested and thrown into an Egyptian prison, where he spent four years  before beginning his slow journey out of radical Islamism. By the time he emerged, he had decided to dedicate his life’s work to reforming Islam from within. He started Quilliam, a counter-extremism organization. Islam and the Future of Tolerance tells the story of an unlikely conversation on a topic of grave importance, and how it changed two foes into friends. Director Jay Shapiro joins us to talk about his engaging and enlightening documentary. For news and updates go to: islamandthefutureoftolerance.com Watch the debate featuring Maajid Nawaz on the Australian Public Affairs program: Think

The SPLC has agreed to settle with Maajid Nawaz and Quilliam for defaming them by calling Maajid an anti Muslim extremist. The legal battle has been going on for nearly two years and finally ended to day. Several weeks ago we saw the SPLC pull down the original article and this to many was a sign of something about to happen. We now learned that it is part of a full apology, retraction, and multi million dollar settlement. Full Disclosure, the SPLC has lied about me in the past and was forced to apologize for it. Support the show (http://timcast.com/donate)

Sam Harris is a neuroscientist and author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, and The Moral Landscape. Maajid Nawaz is a British activist, author, columnist, radio host and politician.

As he prepares to launch his counter-terror organization Quilliam in the US this month, Maajid talks to us about topics isn't often asked about: Is reform in Islam realistic or plausible? What are his own personal/religious beliefs? Does he think the Quran is infallible? Was Muhammad an Islamist? How receptive are different Muslim communities to these ideas? You don't want to miss this. Listen to our conversation. The Secular Jihadists has been made possible thanks to the gracious support of the Illuminati and the great state of Israel. That's what we have been told, but we haven't received our checks yet. In the meantime, we greatly appreciate the support of our current donors. Please consider supporting by sharing the podcast with your fellow heathens or by donating at https://www.patreon.com/SJME Subscribe to The Secular Jihadists on iTunes, Stitcher or your favorite podcast app. And please leave us a review :D

Maajid Nawaz is a counter-extremist, author, columnist, broadcaster and Founding Chairman of Quilliam – a globally active organization focusing on matters of integration, citizenship & identity, religious freedom, immigration, extremism, and terrorism. Maajid’s work is informed by years spent in his youth as a leadership member of a global Islamist group, and his gradual transformation towards liberal democratic values. Having served four years as an Amnesty International adopted “prisoner of conscience” in Egypt, Maajid is now a leading critic of Islamism, while remaining a secular liberal Muslim. Maajid is an Honorary Associate of the UK’s National Secular Society, a weekly columnist for the Daily Beast, a monthly columnist for the liberal UK paper the ‘Jewish News’ and LBC radio’s weekend afternoon radio host. He also provides occasional columns for the London Times, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, among others. Maajid was the Liberal Democrat Parliamentary candidate in London’s Hampstead & Kilburn for the May 2015 British General Election. A British-Pakistani born in Essex, Maajid speaks English, Arabic, and Urdu, holds a BA (Hons) from SOAS in Arabic and Law and an MSc in Political Theory from the London School of Economics (LSE). Maajid relates his life story in his first book, Radical. He co-authored his second book, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, with Sam Harris. Twitter: @maajidnawaz

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Maajid Nawaz about the Southern Poverty Law Center, Robert Spencer, Keith Ellison, moderate Muslims, Shadi Hamid’s notion of “Islamic exceptionalism," the migrant crisis in Europe, foreign interventions, Trump, Putin, Obama’s legacy, and other topics. You can support the Making Sense podcast and receive subscriber-only content at samharris.org/subscribe.

Dear listeners, My apologies for the delayed release. This past week I have lost a childhood friend as well as a close relative. So I've been traveling, and things have been up in the air for a while. Robert has tweeted about this as some sort of plot to edit him to look bad... I can assure you that the content is pretty much unedited. I usually obsessively remove umms and Ahs.. but i even let most of those be for this episode. I may have taken out some dead air or repeated words, but thats about it. I hope you enjoy! Here are some links discussed in the episode: Robert's take on Reza Aslan (where he refers to Reza as 'Islamic Supremacist boy': https://www.jihadwatch.org/2012/09/national-iranian-american-council-confirmed-as-front-group-for-irans-islamic-regime " Reza Aslan exposed: National Iranian American Council confirmed as front group for Iran’s bloody Islamic regime" -- Robert casting further suspicion on Maajid: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2016/11/muslim-reformist-maajid-nawaz-declares-support-for-muslim-brotherhood-linked-congressman-keith-ellison "Muslim reformist Maajid Nawaz declares support for Muslim Brotherhood-linked Congressman Keith Ellison” -- US bloggers banned from entering UK http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-23064355 -- EDL isn't as Benign and non-racist as its defenders make it out to be - Here's a clip of Tommy standing with someone shouting "send the black cunts home" and not really objecting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=schEGyZ8K-Q -- Article by Cathy Young: "In Pam Geller's world everybody Jihads" http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/10/in-pam-geller-s-world-everybody-jihads.html -- Homoeconomicus blog piece on Robert Spencer's Srebrenica genocide denial rebuttal: https://homoeconomicusnet.wordpress.com/2013/10/15/robert-spencer-responds-on-srebrenica/ a comment on this piece shows the pg numbers Robert has not cited in his case against the word 'genocide' " Suada November 5, 2013 at 12:44 pm Spencer response shows his acedemic dishonesty and lack of professional integrety. In addition to your points (as you say, he goes far beyond simply qestioning the usage of the term ‘genocide’), Spencer cites Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal article by Katherine G. Southwick. However, he doesn’t mention what Southwick really says (pp. 193-194); ‘In the spring of 1995, the Bosnian Serbs planned to attack Srebrenica definitively. Radovan Karadzić, President of Republika Srpska, issued a directive to the VRS forces to “complete the physical separation of Srebrenica from Zepa as soon as possible, preventing even communication between individuals in the two enclaves. By planned and well-thought out combat operations, create an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival or life for the inhabitants of Srebrenica.” This was an order to ethnically cleanse Srebrenica. " --- Robert Spencer - Is Obama a Muslim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH3mFX2-tFI

On October 25th, the SPLC released this report identifying 15 individuals who they view as anti-Muslim extremists. Some inclusions make total sense, but 2 stood out: Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Maajid Nawaz. Do their claims about Maajid and Ayaan survive scrutiny? Find out. Here are some links I reference: Great Atlantic article Guardian article on Quilliam … Continue reading AS291: What In the World Is The SPLC Thinking? → The post AS291: What In the World Is The SPLC Thinking? appeared first on Atheistically Speaking.

Anxiety is a monster that is crippling and paralyzed and keeps you in a loop of debiliating negative emotions even when one desperately wants out. What are the causes? What can one do to help themselves? What steps big or small do you suggest?What are your thoughts on immortality or at least living a very very long time as pursued by researchers like Aubrey de Grey? Do you think it's possible? Do you think it's desirable?I remember you mentioning getting flack from Maajid about not liking hip hop. I'm curious. What sort of music you do listen to? Stravinsky, Radiohead, Enya?Why aren't your books translated into Arabic?Can you please do a podcast with Richard Lang, disciple and close friend of the late Douglas Harding about The Headless Way, the westernized version of dzogchen?What are your preferred news sources?I heard you say once before that the left has one advantage over the right in that it has a self correcting mechanism. Well, now that the left seems to be going off the deep end, we need those mechanisms.Did you find that the initial onset of your fame altered your sense of self/ego at all even temporarily? If so, how? Do you credit your background in meditation for helping you keep level headed?On stoicism, you said you were disappointed in how you handled some recent battles. What are your strategies moving forward to evolve and prepare when you suit up for the next one?Sam address request for his views on abortion.We're always hearing about how Iran was a relatively more liberal nation before the Islamic regimes took over. We hear about how the problem of radical Islam is relatively new in the world and that historically Islam was not as violent. If we grab that this is true, does this make religion more or less scary considering that apparently these violent interpretations can arise suddenly and possibly without historical context?Can you tell us anything about your upcoming book on artificial intelligence?What are your thoughts on the transgender debate?What is your position on male circumcision?What would you be working on if 9/11 hadn't happened and you hadn't written The End of Faith? How would your work be different?

Before The U.S. and other nations can be successful against Islamic State (ISIS) and other global jihadists, we must understand the difference between Islam and Islamism. That's the argument from our guest on this week's episode, Maajid Nawaz. "It happens to be that today we are dealing with an insurgency that's rising and growing within my own Muslim community," he says. It doesn't help to deny it." A Sunni Muslim and a former Islamist fundamentalist, who is founding chairman of the London-based counter-terrorism foundation, Quilliam, Maajid makes a powerful argument for freedom, tolerance and respect. He says that President Obama and many other liberal-minded politicians and journalists have been reluctant to call Islamist ideology by its proper name. "Here's where people become paralyzed by political correctness," he argues. "We are unable to say 'Islamist extremism' as distinct from Islam the religion." "I call this the Voldemort affect," citing the villain in the Harry... See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris introduces the audio edition of his book with Maajid Nawaz, "Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue." You can support the Making Sense Podcast and receive subscriber-only content at samharris.org/subscribe.

Sam Harris reflects on his failure to have a productive conversation with Noam Chomsky. Audio Transcipt: I wanted to do another “Ask me Anything” podcast, but I know I’m going to get inundated with questions about my conversation with Noam Chomsky, so in order to inoculate us all against that—or, at least, to make those questions more informed by my view of what happened—I wanted to do a short podcast dealing with the larger problem, as I see it, of having conversations of this kind. More and more, I find myself attempting to have difficult conversations with people who hold very different points of view. And I consider our general failure to have these conversations well—so as to produce an actual convergence of opinion and a general increase in goodwill between the participants—to be the most consequential problem that exists. Apart from violence and other forms of coercion, all we have is conversation with which to influence one another. The fact that it is so difficult for people to have civil and productive conversations about things like U.S. foreign policy, or racial inequality, or religious tolerance and free speech, is profoundly disorienting. And it’s also dangerous. If we fail to do this, we will fail to do everything else of value. Conversation is our only tool for collaborating in a truly open-ended way. So I’ve been experimenting by reaching out to people to have difficult conversations. I recently did this with the Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz, which resulted in a short book, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, that will be published in the fall. As you’ll read in that book, this was not at all guaranteed to work—Maajid and I had a very inauspicious first meeting—but when I later saw the work he was doing, I reached out to him, and the resulting conversation is one in which we made genuine progress. He opened my mind on several important points and, most important, it was a genuine pleasure to show readers that conversation, even on genuinely polarizing topics, can occasionally serve its intended purpose, which is to change minds—even one’s own. Here, I would draw a distinction between a conversation and a debate. They’re superficially similar when the parties disagree, but to have one’s mind changed in a debate is to lose the debate and, very likely, to lose face before one’s audience. This is an incredibly counterproductive way to frame any inquiry into what is true. Occasionally, I engage in public debates, but I’ve never approached them like a high school exercise where one is committed to not changing one’s view. I don’t want to be wrong for a moment longer than I need to be, and if my opponent is right about something, and I can see that, then I will be very quick to admit it. So my dialogue with Maajid was not really a debate, even though at times we were pushing rather hard against one another. It was, rather, a conversation. On the heels of that success, I decided to attempt a similar project with Noam Chomsky, and the results of my failure are on my blog for all to see. Of course, many people understood exactly what I was trying to do and why I published the exchange, and they apparently appreciated my efforts. I tried to have a civil conversation on an important topic with a very influential thinker, and I failed. I published the result because I thought the failure was instructive—the whole purpose was to extract something of value from what seemed like a truly pointless exercise. But that’s not the lesson many readers took away from it. Many of you seem to think that the conversation failed because I arrogantly challenged Chomsky to a debate—probably because I was trying to steal some measure of his fame—and that I immediately found myself out of my depth. And when he devastated me with the evidence of my own intellectual misconduct, and my ignorance of history, and my blind faith in the goodness of the U.S. government, I complained about his being “mean” to me, and I ran away. Well, I must say, I find this view of the situation genuinely flabbergasting. Many of you seem to forget that I published the exchange—you must think I’m a total masochist, or just delusional. Now, I know that some of you think the latter. I heard from one person, I think it was on Twitter, who said, “Sam Harris reminds me of a little kid who thinks he’s playing a video game, and thinks he’s winning, but his controller isn’t actually plugged in.” I happen to love that metaphor. I’m just not so happy to have it applied to me. Anyone who thinks I’ve lost a debate here just doesn’t understand what I was trying to do or why, upon seeing that my attempt at dialogue was a total failure, I bailed out. I really was trying to have a productive conversation with Chomsky, and I encountered little more than contempt, false accusations, and highly moralizing language—accusing me of apologizing for atrocities—and weird evasions, and silly tricks. It was a horror show. I concede that I made a few missteps: I should have dealt with Chomsky’s charges that I misrepresented him immediately and very directly. They are, in fact, tissue-thin. I did not misrepresent his views at all. I simply said that he had not thought about certain questions when I should have said he had thought about them badly. Those of you who have written to tell me that what I did to Chomsky is analogous to what has been done to me by people who actually lie about my views are just not interacting honestly with what happened here: I did not misrepresent Chomsky’s position on anything. And, insults aside, he was doing everything in his power to derail the conversation. The amazing thing is that highly moralizing accusations work for people who think they’re watching a debate. They convince most of the audience that where there’s smoke there must be fire. For instance, when Ben Affleck called me and Bill Maher “racist,” that was all he had to do to convince 50% of the audience. I’m sorry to say that it was the same with Chomsky. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve heard from who think that he showed how ludicrous and unethical my concern about intentions was, for instance—he’s dealing in the “real world,” but all my talk about intentions was just a bizarre and useless bit of philosophizing. But think about that for a second: our legal system depends upon weighing intentions in precisely the way I describe. How else do we differentiate between premeditated murders, crimes of passion, manslaughter, criminal negligence, and terrible accidents for which no one is to blame? Imagine your neighbor’s house burns down and yours with it—what the hell happened? What happened has a lot to do with your neighbor’s intentions. If he had a cooking fire that got out of control, that’s one thing. If he tried to burn down his own house to collect the insurance payment, that’s another. If he tried to burn down the whole neighborhood, because he just hates everyone, that’s another. Intentions matter because they contain all of the information about what your neighbor is likely to do next. There’s a spectrum of culpability here and intention is its very substance. Chomsky seems to think that he has made a great moral discovery in this area and that not intending a harm can sometimes be morally worse than intending one. Now I’m pretty sure that I disagree, but I would have loved to discuss it. I wasn’t debating him about anything, I was trying to figure out what the man actually believes. It’s still not clear to me, because he appeared to be contradicting himself in our exchange. But in response to my questions and the thought experiments I was marshaling in an attempt to get to first principles, all I got back were insults. But worse, many people seem to think that these insults were a sign of the man’s moral seriousness. Many seem to think that belligerence and an unwillingness to have a civil dialogue is a virtue in any encounter like this, and that simply vilifying one’s opponent as a moral monster, by merely declaring him to be one, is a clever thing to do. Now, despite what every Chomsky fan seems to think, there was nowhere in that exchange where I signaled my unwillingness to acknowledge or to discuss specific crimes for which for the U.S. government might be responsible. The United States, and the West generally, has a history of colonialism, slavery, collusion with dictators, and of imposing its will on people all over the world. I have never denied this. But I’m now hearing from people who say things like, “well of course ISIS and al-Qaeda are terrible, but we’re just as bad, worse even, because we created them—literally. And through our selfishness and ineptitude, we created millions of other victims who sympathize with them for obvious reasons. We are, in every morally relevant sense, getting exactly what we deserve.” This kind of masochism and misreading of both ourselves and of our enemies has become a kind of religious precept on the Left. I don’t think an inability to distinguish George Bush or Bill Clinton from Saddam Hussein or Hitler is philosophically or politically interesting, much less wise. And many people, most even, who are this morally confused consider Chomsky their patriarch—and I suspect that’s not an accident. But I wanted to talk to him to see if there was some way to build a bridge off of this island of masochism so that these sorts of people, who I’ve been hearing from for years, could cross over to something more reasonable. And it didn’t work out. The conversation, as I said, was a total failure. But I thought it was an instructive one. So, I don’t know if that answers all of the questions I’m going to get about the Chomsky affair, but when I put out a call for an AMA later this week, forgive me for moving on to other topics, because I don’t think there’s much more to say on this one. But I’m going to keep trying to have conversations like this, because conversation is our only hope.

Sam Harris responds to the charge that “militant” atheism is responsible for the murder of three Muslim students in North Carolina. Note 2/18/15: Here was Reza Aslan’s response to this podcast: Starting to get creeped out by how obsessed Sam Harris is with me & @ggreenwald -as tho we’ve given him a 2nd thought http://t.co/RSbvjck96Q — Reza Aslan (@rezaaslan) February 18, 2015 @neiltwit @ggreenwald @SamHarrisOrg oh no was I mean to your Sam? did I hurt your feelings? — Reza Aslan (@rezaaslan) February 18, 2015 Very interesting. Aslan writes articles about me, hires people to write even longer ones (Nathan Lean is the editor-in-chief of Aslan Media), continually mentions me and distorts my views in his press appearances, and tweets about me with abandon—and he believes that I’m obsessed with him. It is safe to say that I would never mention Aslan again if he stopped spreading lies about me.—SH Audio Transcript: As many of you know, there was recently a triple-murder in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, committed by a person named Craig Stephen Hicks. He is still alive—this was not a suicide-murder—so, undoubtedly, we’ll one day hear what his conscious motives were. He killed three young people, apparently over a parking space. That was the subject of their dispute. But he also happens to be a person who identifies as an atheist on his Facebook page, and he has expressed admiration for people like Richard Dawkins. He might have said something about me, I’m actually not sure—but he was identified as an atheist and appear to be critical of all religion, according to his Facebook page. And because his victims were Muslim, this is now being widely described as a “hate crime” and as a symptom of a problem we have in the Atheist community—a problem of “militancy” and of anti-Muslim “bigotry.” And many people are saying that I am somehow responsible for this—both for the background problem and for the murders themselves, which is quite an amazing thing to be accused of. It seems to me that there’s a fair amount of moral confusion here—and also just factual confusion about the reality of violence in the U.S. and elsewhere. But the first thing to say is that I feel nothing but horror over this crime. These people were killed in the very prime of their lives—at the beginning of their adult lives—and they were, by all accounts, marvelous people. I can only imagine—in fact, I can’t imagine—the grief of their parents and loved ones. So there’s absolutely nothing in my work—or in my mind—that is supportive of a crime like this. And I would have hoped that could go without saying—but I think in this context, it probably can’t. Nevertheless, the deluge of claims of equivalence between this crime and the Charlie Hebdo atrocity, or the daily savagery of a group like ISIS, has been astonishing to witness. You can sense that people have just been waiting for a crime like this that could conceivably be pinned on atheism. Of course, the analogy between “militant” atheism and militant Islam is a terrible one—it is an anti-analogy, being false in every respect. Atheists simply are not out there harming people on the basis of their atheism. There may be atheists who do terrible things, but there is no atheist doctrine or scripture, and insofar as any of us have written books or created arguments that have persuaded people, these books and arguments—insofar as they’re atheistic—only relate to the bad evidence put forward in defense of a belief in God. There’s no argument in atheism that suggests that you should hate, or victimize, or stigmatize whole groups of people, as there often is in revealed religion. And yet people like Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan, the usual suspects—the bevy of apologists for theocracy in the Muslim world—are using this very real tragedy in Chapel Hill to try to stoke a kind of mob mentality around an imagined atheist campaign of bigotry against Muslims. It’s an incredibly cynical, tendentious, and ultimately dangerous thing to do. Of course, people like Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan are alleging that there’s some sort of double-standard here: atheists are quick to detect a religious motivation in the misbehavior of Muslims worldwide, but when it comes to their own, they discount the role played by atheism. But this is just a total misrepresentation of how an atheist like myself thinks about human violence. It is simply obvious that some instances of Muslim violence have nothing whatsoever to do with Islam—and I would never dream of assigning blame to the religion of Islam for that behavior. And, to my knowledge, I never have. Insofar as I’m confused as to the source of Muslim violence—well, then, I apologize in advance for that confusion. But the problem, of course, is that there are teachings within Islam that explicitly recommend, in fact, demand violence in certain circumstances—circumstances that we in the 21st century, if we’re decent human beings, will recognize as being morally insane. Blasphemy, apostasy, adultery, merely holding hands with a man who is not your blood relative or husband if you are a woman unlucky enough to be born in a country like Afghanistan—these are often killing offenses. And the link between the doctrine—as it is understood by Islamists and jihadists—and the behavior is explicit, logical, and absolutely unambiguous. And yet this doesn’t prevent people from denying it at every turn. There is no such link between atheism and violence of any kind, in any circumstance. There is nothing about rejecting the truth claims of religious dogmatists, or about doubting that the universe has a creator, that suggests that violence in certain circumstance is necessary or even acceptable. And all the people who are comparing these murders to Charlie Hebdo or to those committed by ISIS, as insane as that sounds, are trivializing a form of violence that threatens to destabilize much of the world. And, ironically, it is violence whose principal victims are Muslim. I should also point out that the notion that there is some kind of epidemic of intolerance against Muslims in the United States is totally at odds with the facts. You need only check the FBI website and you’ll see that there is no such wave of religious bigotry directed against Muslims, or against anyone at all. Hate crime is a very rare offense—five people were murdered due to hate crime in 2013. And when you look at the hate crimes directed at people based on religion, the crimes against Jews based on anti-Semitism outnumber the crimes against Muslims five-to-one—and this is every year, even in 2002 in the immediate aftermath of 9-11. So, if we’re going to be concerned about hate crimes in the U.S., we should worry about anti-Semitism before we worry about anti-Muslim hate crime—and yet anti-Semitism is a miniscule source of violence here. I wouldn’t necessarily say the same thing of France, but in the U.S. it is virtually a non-problem—especially when you compare it to the tens of thousands of ordinary murders and rapes and aggravated assaults that are not ideologically motivated. Many people are saying that these murders in Chapel Hill could not have possibly have been inspired by a dispute over something so trivial as a parking space. But this is the most common form of interpersonal violence—it never makes sense “on paper.” We’re talking about people who fail to regulate their emotions and who have, in the U.S., ready access to weapons that makes it incredibly easy to kill other people impulsively. Hate crime per se is simply not a major problem, and those who are trying to whip-up a frenzy of concern over the ambient level of bigotry and violence against Muslims in the U.S. are trying to engineer a kind of moral panic, designed to distract people from the real problem that Muslims face—and that we all face, frankly—which is this basic incompatibility between 7th century theocracy and our collective aspiration to build a truly pluralistic and global civil society. You can view all of this through the lens of free speech. All you need to consider is a phenomenon like Charlie Hebdo or The Satanic Verses. And, for some reason, people on the left have aligned themselves with theocrats and those who are truly intolerant of the very liberal values that apologists for Islam think they are enunciating. As I’ve said before, tolerance of intolerance is just cowardice. And it’s a form of cowardice that is increasingly consequential. So the analogy between so called “militant” atheism and militant Islam is nothing more than a moral hoax. The thing that very few people seem able to distinguish, and the distinction that Greenwald and Aslan obfuscate at every opportunity, is the difference between criticizing ideas and their results in the world, and hating people as people because they belong to a certain group, or because they have a certain skin color, or because they have come from a certain country. There is no connection between those two orientations—the latter, of course, is bigotry, and I condemn it as much as anyone could hope. But criticizing ideas and their consequences is absolutely essential, and that is the spirit in which I have criticized Islam (in its various flavors), and Christianity, and Judaism, and Buddhism—and all of these criticisms are different because these belief systems are different. That’s the distinction one has to recognize, and the clarity of that distinction leads to an experience in the world that our critics seem to not imagine possible. For instance, after I had that collision with Ben Affleck on Bill Maher’s show Real Time, where I uttered this now infamous line “Islam is the motherlode of bad ideas”—as I’ve said before, I slightly misspoke there; I should have said it is a motherlode of bad ideas; it’s not the only motherlode of bad ideas, but it’s the one that concerns me most at this moment in history—afterwards, I was in a restaurant and the maitre d’ came over and introduced himself, saying that he recognized me from the show and that he was Muslim. Our resulting conversation was a purely positive encounter between two people who simply had very different views about Islam. It was no surprise to me, and there was no difficulty in acknowledging, that my blanket condemnation of the doctrine of Islam didn’t capture his experience as a devout and peaceful Muslim. I understand that, and he understood where I was coming from. He understood that I wasn’t talking about him when I criticized ideas like jihad, and martyrdom, and apostasy. We had this conversation in a spirit of absolute mutual respect and tolerance. There was not a scintilla of bigotry in my mind. This guy was the nicest guy in the world. I’ve been back to the restaurant since. I hugged him—there’s absolutely nothing hostile about my orientation toward individual people who happen to be Muslim. Of course, given the requisite beliefs on their part, hostility might be inevitable. If I find myself in the presence of a Muslim who thinks that infidels are the scum of the earth, we’re probably not going to be hugging each other. But the idea that my criticism of concepts leads me to hate people—there’s simply no point of contact between that and my actual psychology. And I’m sure this true of Richard Dawkins. And it was true of Hitch, And it’s true of Lawrence Krauss, and every other prominent atheist who unfortunately has to waste a fair amount of his or her life criticizing the terrible doctrines of religion. Not to put too fine a point on this, but the psychological reality of being a so-called “militant atheist” seems to be so difficult for our critics to imagine that I feel like I need to give another example: I’m writing this book with Maajid Nawaz—no doubt many of you are familiar with who he is. He’s a former Islamist and now a Muslim-reformer—brilliant, interesting, indispensable—who I now consider to be a friend. He wasn’t a friend before this collaboration because we didn’t know each other, but now I consider him a friend, and actually a personal hero. He is just an immensely courageous man. So he and I are collaborating on this book, the title of which is Islam and the Future of Tolerance. And, as you’ll see, much of it has the character of a debate, where I push somewhat hard on specific ideas within Islam, and he tells me how these ideas are susceptible to more benign interpretations so as to move Islam forward into the 21st century. But the crucial point is that I do not have to censor myself on the topic of Islam to have this conversation. Maajid knows exactly what I think about Islam and concepts like jihad, martyrdom, and apostasy. He knows exactly how I feel about the treatment of women throughout the Muslim world. There is no contradiction between having a civil, but nonetheless hard-hitting and searching conversation about a very important, even inflammatory, topic, and having a positive ethical orientation toward the person you are arguing with. I actually said something to this effect in a recent Washington Post interview, and Glenn Greenwald linked to this article saying, “Sam Harris wants us to know that he has a Muslim friend.” He was accusing me of using the “some of my best friends are black” defense. And he also labeled Maajid “a critic of Islam” by way of dismissing him. Of course, he’s the kind of Muslim Sam Harris would associate with. So, he dismissed Maajid as an Uncle Tom—and please remember that this coming from a gay Jew living safely outside of the Muslim world who would be hurled from a rooftop anyplace within it. Perhaps the most charitable interpretation I can give to this behavior is that people like Greenwald and Aslan think that my criticism of Islam—and the work of the “New Atheists” generally—is so easily misunderstood by mentally unbalanced, racist, or xenophobic people that it’s dangerous. It’s dangerous to focus on Islam because bad people will misinterpret the significance of this focus and commit murders of the sort we just witnessed in North Carolina. Let me concede that it’s certainly possible that the murders in North Carolina were a hate crime. It could be that when Hicks starts talking, he’ll tell us how much he hated Muslims and he just wanted to kill a few. And he might even say that he read The God Delusion and The End of Faith and God is not Great and took from these books some kind of rationale to victimize Muslims at random. I think it is incredibly unlikely that this is the case. I will be flabbergasted if Hicks says that his atheism drove him to commit these murders. And yet the next jihadist will almost certainly say that his religion mandated his behavior. So perhaps people like Greenwald and Aslan think that criticizing Islam is dangerous because it can be misunderstood by bad people. Well, by that standard, we couldn’t criticize anything. As Ali Rizvi pointed out, we shouldn’t criticize U.S. foreign policy because some number of people overseas could become so agitated by reading Noam Chomsky or Glenn Greenwald that they might then kill U.S. tourists at random. Is that possible? Sure, it’s possible. But we have to be able to criticize U.S. foreign policy—and some of what people like Chomsky and Greenwald say about U.S. foreign policy is correct. Should they be held responsible if some deranged person takes their writing and uses it as a basis for intolerance or even murder? Of course not. And the same can be said for any criticism of the doctrine of Islam. I want to make one thing very clear, however: Publishing the opinion that I have blood on my hands and then backing this claim up with conscious misrepresentations of my views about Islam is a dangerous thing to do. It’s dangerous for me. It’s not dangerous for Greenwald and Aslan, and they know it. But it increases the risk to me and my family from religious lunatics in the Muslim community. Both Aslan and Greenwald know that some number of people among their readers are proper lunatics—goons and madmen who are organized entirely around the sanctity of Islam and its importance to the future of humanity—and if you tell them, as Aslan and Greenwald repeatedly have, either in their own words or by circulating the lies of others, that I want to “nuke the Muslim world,” or that I want to “round the Muslims up for torture,” or that I am a “genocidal fascist maniac,” or that I want to profile dark-skinned people at airports, or that I want to kill people for “thought crimes,” or that I have “blood on my hands” for the murder of three beautiful people in North Carolina—this is dangerous. I’ve asked them to stop it, and I’m asking them to stop it again now. I’m about to release a book with Maajid Nawaz—and Maajid has serious security concerns. He is my co-author. Telling millions of people that I have incited hatred against Muslims that led to the deaths of these poor people in North Carolina is a totally unethical thing to do. Greenwald and Aslan are mendacious bullies who are making it unsafe to criticize bad ideas that must be criticized. There is no view that I have ever published that I am hiding from. I’ve written about torture and profiling, but none of my ideas reduce to anything that could be the basis for hatred against whole groups of people. And it’s very difficult—it just may be impossible—to counter these lies once they are in circulation. As I was recording this podcast, in the last few hours, there was an incident in Denmark where a meeting about these issues—about free speech and blasphemy and the drawing of cartoons—was attacked by a terrorist. One person died and several were injured, and then this terrorist went on to kill someone in a synagogue. You can hear the audio from this attack on the BBC website. In fact, I’ll play it for you. This is what it’s like for peaceful people to gather in a café and attempt to have a conversation on these issues in an open society: [AUDIO…] You have to ask yourself, what kind of world do you want to live in? What kind of world do you want your kids to live in? This is the world you are living in now. As someone who is spending a fair amount of time dealing with these issues, I can tell you that I no longer feel safe doing so. And apart from jihadists, themselves, there is no one I know of who is making this job less safe that people like Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan. And not just for me, obviously. I’m also talking about those people in Copenhagen, I’m taking about people in open societies everywhere who have to deal with this growing menace of jihadism. Unless we can speak honestly about this, unless we can resist the theocratic demands being placed on us, we will lose our way of life—in fact, we have already lost it in many respects. We have to reclaim our freedom of speech. So, if you care about living in an open society that doesn’t more and more resemble Jerusalem or Beirut, if you care about free speech—real freedom of speech, not merely its political guarantee, but the reality of being able to speak about what you need to speak about in public without being murdered by some maniac or without having to spend the rest of your life being hunted by a religious mob—if you care about my work or the work of other secularists or atheists, if you care about the work of Muslim reformers like Maajid Nawaz, or apostates like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, if you care about our ability to notice, and criticize, and correct for bad ideas, then you must condemn this behavior. You have to condemn the deliberate manufacture of lies designed to make it unsafe to have honest conversations. So please push back against this. Please lose your patience for shocking displays of intellectual dishonesty on the part of people like Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan and all the other commentators who obfuscate the plain reality of religious extremism. Your response to this really matters. The things that you do on your own blogs, and on social media, and on comment threads really make a difference. Thanks for your help.