Sam Harris: The Lack of Transparency In My Journalism Is For Your Benefit

I’m reluctant to respond to the verbose ramblings of a Sam Harris acolyte, doubly so one who has shoehorned into his rant both homophobic and misogynistic slurs and previously written “In Defense of Tommy Robinson”.

I’m actively trying to extract of anything of substance; in all sincerity – Anything beyond the  irrelevant, the whataboutery, the ad-hominen attacks, the misrepresentations and the obfuscation.  I’ll reread for the third time…

This in it’s entirety is the closest I can get to a relevant and coherent argument.

On the face of it it’s utter nonsense. Certainly nothing there is worth “bearing in mind”.

Maybe a timeline is in order?

• May 25 2011: Sam Harris launches a diatribe against Muslims entitled “Bombing Our Illusions” in which he openly calls for the “ethnic profiling” of Muslims. It is published in The Huffington Post.  He calls for no compromise on not only Muslims being ethnically profiled by the State but insists Muslims must also profile their fellow Muslims within their communities.
• 2011-2015: Harris repeatedly speaks out of both sides of his mouth on the issue of racial/ethnic profiling, often contradicting himself. (“Ethnic” profiling is “racial” profiling ). He is attacked periodically by those that value equal rights for all and civil liberties.
• March 12, 2015: Arthur Chu of Salon denigrates Harris for his advancement of “Islamophobic racism”. He attacks Harris for his “racial profiling” advocacy.
• Between March 8th and March 20, 2015: The Web Archive shows that  Sam Harris secretly edited his website to remove his call to “ethnically profile” Muslims. No notification is given to his audience of this amendment. Almost four years after Bombing Our Illusions was first published.
• March 16, 2016: Harris’ secret editing is spotted by a Twitter  user and his breach of journalistic ethics travels around Twitter.
• April 2016: Harris excuses himself for his lack of transparency. He publishes “his editorial policy” which run contrary to universally accepted journalistic codes of ethics. For example, The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Conduct states:

Ethical journalism means taking responsibility for one’s work and explaining one’s decisions to the public…Journalists should:…– Acknowledge mistakes and correct them promptly and prominently. Explain corrections and clarifications carefully and clearly

As you will now (hopefully) observe you’ve wasted both of our time defending clear breaches of journalistic ethics. Hopefully, next time you’ll spend more time in contemplation if you can fight the Pavlovian response to defend the infallible cult-leader.