I have to confess to a bit of man-crush when it comes to author Sam Harris, who has said a lot of things I have wanted to say, only with more clarity and eloquence than my feeble intellect could muster. There is no sarcasm in that comment. It's simply true.
It's the same feeling I had upon reading Christopher Hitchens for the first time after 9/11 and Paul Berman's "Terror and Liberalism". Simply put, I said to myself "That's it!" as plodded through various writings of there.
It was only a matter of time before I realized that the drink-sodden Hitchens had left me at the altar when he refused to oppose the Iraq war, astonishingly never bothering to consider the difficulties that might come about from a administration who was elected on a platform against nation-building to attempt to build a nation composed of a minority group who had ruled the nation, and a majority group who shared a religion with the massive, powerful nation next to it, Iran. As for Berman, he just faded away like the person you had a quick fling with.
Harris, like Hitchens and Berman, was quickly villlified for his rational views on terrorism and muslims. His arguments weren't necessarily new, they were just better phrased and clearer.
By far one of my favorite articles by Harris was the article in which he disclosed himself as a practitioner of BJJ, aka Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
It was 1998 when I walked into a Karate training hall in Napa, California and began to study the martial arts. One of the methods of fighting they taught was the ground-fighting popularized by the Gracie Family, known as Gracie Jiu-Jitsu and now generally termed Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, a fighting style developed from the same Judo studied by teachers of my teacher. I became fascinated by my ability to dominate much larger, stronger opponents with knowledge, skill and my limited athleticism.
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