Sam Harris Wrestling the trolls.

[DaveDodo007]

It seems that trashing reputations is P Z bag.

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/wrestling-the-troll

I don't always agree with Sam Harris but he must get misrepresented as much, if not more so then Richard Dawkins.

[Audley Strange]

That is fascinating. I always wanted to see Harris and Scott Atran continue the debate they had during beyond belief and afterwords on Edge. I have much sympathy for Atran's position, but I felt he's been given short shrift by the skeptic movement for not jumping on the Islam is the root of all evil bandwagon.

I never realised that Myers was so disrepected. It stands to reason, if he can't even defend his position against a fucking semi-literate indolent doofus like me without coming across like a prick, let alone the dozens of smarter people who've been taking him to task for years, why would his imagined "peers" have any time for him.

Tis a shame really.

[Robert_S]

He's been going up against easy targets like creationists and obviously bigoted fundies.

I think he needs to up his game a bit. He relies too much on labels and a howling band of back slappin' buddies.

[Thinking Aloud]

That is a great article in general, about how the internet treats reputations online, and Sam's unflinchingly calm response is an excellent example to follow, however irritating it may be.

I sometimes find myself getting irritated by people besmirching "our" reputation out there (easy to see just now if you google us) but I ask myself if it's worth the energy doing so? Ultimately readers can either choose to believe the first thing they read about Sam Harris, or Rationalia, or the Edinburgh Flycatcher's Society on the internet and dogmatically copy/paste it into their opinions - or they can investigate, gather the evidence themselves and form their own opinions.

[Robert_S]

That is a great article in general, about how the internet treats reputations online, and Sam's unflinchingly calm response is an excellent example to follow, however irritating it may be.

I sometimes find myself getting irritated by people besmirching "our" reputation out there (easy to see just now if you google us) but I ask myself if it's worth the energy doing so? Ultimately readers can either choose to believe the first thing they read about Sam Harris, or Rationalia, or the Edinburgh Flycatcher's Society on the internet and dogmatically copy/paste it into their opinions - or they can investigate, gather the evidence themselves and form their own opinions.

People have limited resources. They have to narrow down the seemingly infinite possibilities on the internet to fit their limited time. So I don't blame people much if they dismiss too summarily.

It is difficult to overlook the role that blog comments play in all this. Having a blog and building a large community of readers can destroy a person’s intellectual integrity—as appears to have happened in the case of PZ Myers. Many people who read his blog come away convinced that I am a racist who advocates the widespread use of torture and a nuclear first strike against the entire Muslim world. The most despicable claims about me appear in the comment thread, of course, but Myers is responsible for publishing them. And so I hold him responsible for circulating and amplifying some of the worst distortions of my views found on the Internet.

So, is PZ responsible for the Horde?

[Thinking Aloud]

That is a great article in general, about how the internet treats reputations online, and Sam's unflinchingly calm response is an excellent example to follow, however irritating it may be.

I sometimes find myself getting irritated by people besmirching "our" reputation out there (easy to see just now if you google us) but I ask myself if it's worth the energy doing so? Ultimately readers can either choose to believe the first thing they read about Sam Harris, or Rationalia, or the Edinburgh Flycatcher's Society on the internet and dogmatically copy/paste it into their opinions - or they can investigate, gather the evidence themselves and form their own opinions.

People have limited resources. They have to narrow down the seemingly infinite possibilities on the internet to fit their limited time. So I don't blame people much if they dismiss too summarily.

One of my internet "hobbies" is checking out the claims in 'inspirational' or 'missing child' or similar images that get pasted around Facebook, with instructions to share. You're right that often people don't have time to check things out, but is that an excuse to just assume it's all true because it makes one feel good or better for having passed it along? That's exactly the same as sky fairies and saying prayers.

[DaveDodo007]

So, is PZ responsible for the Horde?

I don't know to be honest, don't we have some lawyers on this site, I would really like an answer to this question.

[Audley Strange]

Yes, because he never censored them or chastised them, often encouraged them, while condemning those who attempted to take them to task on as he says quite a lot, HIS BLOG.

I'm now going to do the unthinkable.

I know very little about P.Z. Myers personal history. I know nothing of what happened to him as a child, what shaped him as a boy to be fascinated by Cthulhu and his fiendish underwater minions. I only know that such has left him with a certain view of a world which I do not share. I cannot say whether he just got caught up in the spokes of a the fashionable anti-religion bandwagon or whether he was motivated to speak out. However speak out he did and he provided a place, for some people perhaps that was useful in ridding them of their fictions. I don't know, but if he did, good for him.

However, somewhere along the line, he stopped being P.Z. Myers and became !!!P.Z. MYERS!!! Internet Atheist rock and roll superstar, to some fools if not to himself. But let's be honest, who (well me, but I'm told, I'm Audley Strange) really doesn't like compliments and flattery. Perhaps he began to think, "you know what? I'm doing some good here."

Can't blame him for that. Would never blame him for his style either. Let's honest when the opposition are a bunch of child fucking Sadistic fantasists who've cast a black spell over the world for a couple of thousand years, that's a fight worth having, no matter what rhetoric or invective is used. The problem is, I think he fell into the common problem of beginning to believe his own bullshit was righteous. Which is exactly what the fight against religion is about. I think Harris has on occassion fallen into that too, but he wisely detached himself from, rather than encouraging, an echo chamber of crazed netizens.

I mean, jesus christ, listen to us lot, we're fucking bananas! So I think, I hope that he's at least perceptive enough to see he's been dragged down into this psychic sewage and rather than trying to get out has been floating on top of it, wallowing in it. I hope he can see that its all just semiotic effluvium and represents the person as much as an actual shit does. After all he's been guilty of it himself.

Let's all lay off him, give him a break. The point's been made if he's not seeing it by now, then its futile. We've lost another bunch of useful minds deadened by their own fundamentalist bullshit over-riding their reason. We shouldn't be gloating or celebrating that, it's a Pyrrhic victory at best, no?

[Pappa]

What an excellent article.

[Bella Fortuna]

Indeed it is.

Sam Harris

[FBM]

What an excellent article.

An eye-opener. Harris gets my sympathy, as does anyone whose views are distorted by an overly emotional, politically correct, politically motivated horde who have nothing but knee-jerk reactions to sound bytes and don't even bother to take the time to reason out the ideas for themselves before slinging shit at them.

[Audley Strange]

Thing is that I think he's naive if he thinks his writing style is the cause of misinterpretation. It's not. You could say something as innocuous as "I love sausages" on the net and someone somewhere will read that and translate it into "I like killing animals for fun while I worship at the flesh stained altar of Priapus." I don't know how that happens exactly, but it does, I'm guessing ideology edits perception.

[FBM]

Indeed...People love the filters they put between their minds and what's actually out there.

[Pappa]

Indeed...People love the filters they put between their minds and what's actually out there.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

I just read that article after a night of skeptics in the pub and... more pub and came running here, ready to post the link...

I should have known I wouldn't be the first.

But still...

"that shepherd of Internet trolls PZ Myers",
"PZ Myers’s odious blog",
"people like PZ Myers continue to malign me as an advocate of “racial profiling.” I have written to Myers personally about this and answered his charges publicly. His only response has been to attack me further and to endorse the false charges of others.",
"unscrupulous people like PZ Myers",
"Having a blog and building a large community of readers can destroy a person’s intellectual integrity—as appears to have happened in the case of PZ Myers.",
"None of us know what our online lives will look like in five years. But we know that the Internet does not forget. And every day I confront the evidence of harm done to my reputation, and to the reputations of others, by people who seem accountable to no one apart from a growing army of trolls."

...bear repeating.

I am not Harris's biggest fan - I always thought him the lightweight of the 4 horsemen and disagreed (amicably) with some, but not most, of his points - but he is always worth reading and he marked PeeZee Herman's Myers' card on this one. And, for all Myers deliberately strident posturing, he will never be more than an annoying footsoldier - not worthy of a mount.

I am awaiting the Pharyngula response with growing ennui.