u/blackglum

Some film from my holiday to New Zealand with Alla Bruletova. Streaks in some of the photos is due to an undiagnosed shutter capping on my Leica MP at 1/1000 which wasn’t seen until after. Film is Kodak Portra 400.

I just had a re-listen of episode 362 with Douglas Murray and Josh Szeps which was released around six months after October 7, and much of it touches all the points that I still see in the critics of Sam and Israel here and elsewhere.

This excerpt, in particular, gets to the core of the issue in the West — and perhaps why Sam continues to fail every purity test in the eyes of his critics, on this subject.

>Starting point is 00:26:32

>Sam Harris: Well, some people will say, certainly in the US and the UK, that the crucial difference is that we're implicated in what Israel does because we sell them weapons. This is a point that, you know, Noam Chomsky always makes. But I mean, you know, this, to my eye, is just clearly bullshit because we sell Saudi Arabia weapons. And in fact, they're the largest buyer of our weapons, I believe. And, you know, as you know, they've killed something like 400,000 people in Yemen fairly recently. And one could well ask, where are all the protests? You know, where are the convulsions of conscience throughout our universities? You know, it hasn't happened, and I think it won't happen because what really seems to be energizing here is a hatred of the West and, you know, to a degree that has surprised many of us, a hatred of Jews as somehow the, strangely, some kind of apotheosis of Western oppression.

>Douglas: That's right. Yes, with the Jews as the top of the oppressor hierarchy. Josh and I have been talking about this a bit recently. I mean, yeah, if you do that oppressor-oppressed, colonizer-colonized interpretation of all of the world, that you start with America, and then go everywhere else, you see, this is where you end up. I mean, again, with the selling of arms and so on the idea that we are complicit i mean that is such uh self i mean such narcissist narcissistic bs apart from this is why you see protests on campuses demanding that you know everyone in the faculty of um literature should could call for an immediate uh ceasefire the Middle East, and why haven't they? This is why you get the council chamber in Chicago disrupted, with people calling not for a ceasefire in Chicago, which is much needed, but for a ceasefire in Gaza. What do you think you're doing?

>Douglas: And again, it comes back onto the why was there not one protest calling for the return of the hostages? It comes back to what Josh was saying about the losing of sympathy. I don't think the sympathy is there. I think there's a pathology there, an utter pathology among particularly young people who've been taught into it. And this idea of the world and the idea of the world as colonizer and colonizer, the idea of the world as simply finding the oppressor, everyone, and the oppressor is always the white European. And so I think this is a pathology and people were taught into it, so they should be taught out of it.

This conversation identifies a real asymmetry: the extraordinary moral fixation on Israel, compared with the relative silence around other conflicts involving far greater death tolls, other Western allies, and other arms relationships.

That asymmetry still demands an explanation.

I hope those here who often verbalise Sams 'thin skin' and is 'afraid to debate those with opposing views', can practise what they preach and stomach listening to a podcast with Douglas without their own throat clearing.

Sam Harris defends, and clarifies, his recent Mamdani comments. I agree with him. Look forward to the usual
suspects in the comments that will no doubt give their most charitable interpretation of Sam.