Comment by gataca | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gataca | Hacker News Reader

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Said's original work was just as myopic as this more recent revisit. There are so many issues with this article that it's difficult to list them all.

The author completely ignores the long history of conflict and colonialism in the opposite direction, namely from the Islamic world and into Europe. The idea of "the Other" is actually codified in Islamic law with religious minorities forced to wear distinctive clothing (the yellow mark for Jews predates its use in Germany by centuries) and pay special taxes, as well as numerous other restrictions.

Another tactic used by this author is to argue against the most extreme and least educated of the 'Orientalists' (Sheldon Adelson and Steve Bannon) instead of engaging with more thoughtful critics of current Islamic culture like Sam Harris and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

My last point is that this guy also forgets Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. His examples of 'experts' who misunderstand the Arab world for a nefarious purpose can just as easily apply to political 'experts' in the US who couldn't have fathomed that someone like Donald Trump could ever win the presidency.

>this guy also forgets Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Perhaps he is just not a fan of aphorisms pulled from Murphy's law themed joke books.

Though the trouble with Hanlon's law is not in its origins, rather it is that malice and stupidity are not in any regard mutually exclusive and also that people are quite adept at disguising malice as stupidity.

I do not think the benefit of Hanlon's law is intended to be predictive. It seems rather more like a commentary on how our beliefs about people tend to be self-fulfilling prophecies.

I just think it is a clumsy version of giving someone the benefit of the doubt. Is a social grace you can grant people to not look too closely at what they are doing and assume the best about them. And in moderation it is a good thing to be doing. It is definitely not a good approach to analysis of academia or government however, which is where I often see it used, usually to defend ones outlook or respective 'team'.

edit - it also makes me very suspicious about Hanlon. Maybe not the first person I would trust if they tried to play dumb.

I think it is mostly useful as a self-check for the types of people prone to paranoia. I easily develop that sort of mindset and it's been a huge help to my personal worldview.

That is a good use for it. Perhaps the Murphy's Law series is actually a collection of koans from an occult western zen tradition.

It's funny because if you go on r/samharris today you can see it's got a thriving population of white nationalists defending every last racist, right-wing propagandist, and promoter of white genocide theories (Stefan Molyneux, Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopolous, Tommy Robinson, Steve Bannon, Charles Murray, etc.)

> Another tactic used by this author is to argue against the most extreme and least educated of the 'Orientalists' (Sheldon Adelson and Steve Bannon) instead of engaging with more thoughtful critics of current Islamic culture like Sam Harris and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

This turns out to be much more of an interesting comment than you intend, insofar you do understand how his work is perfectly coherent with Steve Bannon's project, except with a "respectability" coat on.

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