Vox Day posted this quote from Sam Harris the other day without providing a link.
Whether or not there is any truth to [peck] harm is irrelevant. There are numerous studies that prove the power of psychosomatic thinking. This is why we must censor anti[peck] information at all costs: because people who "believe" they've taken poison will suffer ill-effects as if they actually took poison.
Sam Hariss, 7 September 2022
This immediately set off my BS detector. Say what you will about Sam Harris, he is an educated, literate person, and there is approximately zero chance that he would hyphenate ill-effects or use quotation marks for emphasis. Also, people who support censoring information never say they want to censor information in those words; some euphemism would be used for censor, and the object of the censorship would be misinformation, disinformation, or at the very least controversial claims. Finally, the argument itself -- trivially easy to discredit by replacing peck with smoking -- is just a bit too retarded even for a Nu-Atheist.
And, surprise, surprise, Googling the supposed quote turns up pretty much nothing. I haven't been able to find Vox's source. A September 12 post on /sci/ has the same quote but credits it only to "Sam Harris, September 2022" without mentioning the exact date, so Vox must have gotten that detail from somewhere else.
This September 12 Reddit thread asks "Did Sam [Harris] actually tweet this?" and receives the reply that he did not, but the original post has been deleted, so I can't see the exact content of the alleged tweet. Checking Harris's Twitter, I find that he tweeted nothing at all between September 5 and September 12.
I did find this supposed Twitter screencap on iFunny. It has the September 7 date, but it can't be Vox's source because the quote itself is slightly different -- and slightly more believable, since it lacks two of the red flags I noted ("believe" and ill-effects).
This is sus on other grounds -- what self-respecting anti-Semite doesn't know and use the correct plural of goy? -- but is it still possible that Harris really tweeted this and later deleted it?
No. Because it's 310 characters. Twitter's limit is 280. Either someone went to the trouble of making a fake Twitter screenshot out of a real Sam Harris quote -- there's no telling what "goys" will do! -- or Vox has been had.
