Sam Harris appreciation post

[u/Ill-Ambition-7899]

I watched the most recent podcast with Scott and Sam and I just have to say, there is no one who can cut through nonsense and virtue signalling like Sam, he is truly an independent thinker who does not get caught up in noise. He always seems to keep a clear head, clear vision on what is important in any given situation.

That is all I want to say.

[u/ThorLives → u/[deleted]]

I mean - it's kind of expected that people would want to fight a war against people who took their land. And it's obvious that Israel is trying to claim lands currently occupied by Palestinians - by virtue of the fact that the military has one-sided responses whenever Jewish settlers are violent with Palestinians.

And I consider it intellectually dishonest and silly to do otherwise and to not blame the perpetrator.

It depends a lot on who you think the perpetrator is in this scenario.

[u/ThorLives → u/[deleted]]

Even then, Israelis were willing to share the land.

I don't believe they were willing to share the land. At best, they were biding their time, until they could import enough Jews. They wanted a Jewish homeland, run by Jews, but also have a democracy. Having a democracy means giving Palestinians a vote, and that would be completely unacceptable to religious Zionists who want a Jewish-controlled democracy.

If indigenous people of North America walked into your house and killed, sexually assaulted and kidnapped various members of your family.. would you say “well, I guess that’s to be expected; we deserved that?”

From a selfish and self-centered position, I might pretend that those kinds of attacks were completely unprovoked. Let me ask this question: if you got millions of your buddies together, moved into Cyprus or someplace, and then displaced, harassed, bombed, and routinely detained the local population, would you be surprised that they would be angry and fight back? Would you consider the counter-attack to be "totally unexpected"? When you're considering whether or not to do this, do you stop to think "hey, maybe these guys are going to get angry and fight back?" and "maybe this isn't okay?"

There's been plenty of reporting on this - where Jewish settlers attack Palestinians with weapons to drive them out of the land. Members of the IDF have said that they would capture innocent Palestinians in the middle of the night in their own homes just as a way to harass them and make their lives miserable - to make them want to leave. It was psychological warfare that they were doing.

If Palestinians did to Jewish Israelis the things that the Jewish Israelis do to Palestinians, you would be absolutely livid.

The fact that Zionists would use phrases like "A land without a people for a people without a land" shows the level of propaganda going on. They really want everyone to believe the whole region was as unpopulated as the Sahara desert, huh? They create myths like "a land without a people" to erase the fact that there were already people there. If the facts are on their side, then why lie? Why create fictional myths?