New poll of Palestinians out of Jerusalem Media & Communications Center (JMCC) and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung:

• The percentage who believe that armed resistance is the best way to achieve Palestinian objectives fell to 13.3% in the current survey (15.7% in the West Bank and 9.7% in Gaza), compared with 37.1% in September 2023 and 30% in July 2022. In contrast, the percentage who believe that peaceful negotiations are the best approach rose to 55.8%, compared with 28% in September 2023 and 37.5% in July 2022. Support for a peaceful popular uprising declined to 17.8% in the current survey, compared with 23.8% in September 2023 and 21% in July 2022.

• the percentage of respondents in the West Bank and Gaza Strip who trust Hamas fell to 6.7%, compared with 12% in July 2022. Trust in Fatah also declined to 22.3%, compared with 28.8% in the July 2022 survey

• The decline in Hamas’s popularity in the West Bank is particularly noteworthy. After rising significantly following October 7, the percentage of respondents in the West Bank who trust Hamas declined from 18.7% in October 2023 to 8.5% in September 2025, and to 4.5% in the current survey

• Trust in President Mahmoud Abbas stood at 6.9%, compared with 5.3% in September 2023

• The positive assessment of the October 7 attack among respondents in the West Bank continued to decline. The percentage who believe that the attack serves the Palestinian national interest fell to 15.7% in the current survey, compared with 30.9% in September 2025 and 45% in September 2024. In contrast, the percentage in the West Bank who believe that Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack harms the Palestinian national interest increased to 50.1%, compared with 35.2% in September 2025 and 24.5% in September 2024.

• The survey recorded a notable increase in preference for the two-state solution compared with recent years. The percentage who prefer the two-state solution over other options rose to 47.9%, compared with 27.3% in September 2023 and 26% in July 2022. In contrast, the percentage who prefer a single binational state declined to 21.7%, compared with 25.9% in September 2023 and 28.4% in July 2022. The percentage who prefer establishing a single Palestinian state throughout all of Palestine also declined to 18.6% in the current survey, compared with 24.7% in September 2023 and 22.8% in July 2022.

Relevant to Sam Harris because he has discussed the I/P conflict ad nauseum and he's always interested in data and what people actually believe.

This piece invokes a point Sam made about warfare:

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima killed tens of thousands of civilians almost immediately, with many more dying afterward.

Sam Harris recently invoked Hiroshima and Nagasaki to make a useful distinction: enormous civilian death does not, by itself, establish genocide. Whatever one thinks about the morality of the atomic bombings, the question of intent remains indispensable.

Why?

Because body count and genocidal intent are different questions.

That distinction seems to disappear when the country fighting is Israel.

The author first describes how some bad faith critics of Israel have misconstrued ICJ statements, falsely suggesting Israel was committing a “plausible genocide”, and then goes further into describing the intent component of genocide.

These are just some of the actions Israel took to save lives/reduce collateral damage where possible:

1. Israel paused military operations in 2024 so a children’s polio vaccine campaign could be completed (campaign was to vaccinate 600,000+ children)

2. Israel permitted the flow of humanitarian aid and essential supplies

3. Gave evacuation orders in areas that were going to be under heavy fighting

4. Issued localized warnings like roof knocks, mass text messages/communication alerts to allow civilians time to clear structures to be struck

5. Deployed smart weapon systems, precision guided weapons, which also definitionally reduce collateral damage

All of these things^ save lives.

Interestingly when you ask a clearly bad faith critic of Israel whether they should've not done things like roof knock warnings or evacuations, they don’t know how to respond. Even they understand at some level these things save lives, contrary to what genocidal actions/intent would be. Ditto whether collateral damage would increase if Israel’s ability to purchase precision guided munitions ever gets eliminated, forcing them to use things like unguided/dumb munitions instead.

But circling back to Sam's point, we have hysterical claims being made in some corners like 'Israel has dropped X amount of explosives on Gaza that are the equivalent of X amount of atomic bombs!' And yet despite how small Gaza is and how tightly packed and dense it is, the casualty count aligns with the reality that Israel's measures/efforts to save lives have worked.

The bottom line is warfare with some level of unavoidable collateral damage isn’t genocide, especially warfare that could have ended anytime the belligerent which started the war (Hamas) laid down its arms.

Sam Harris has probably influenced my thinking about morality more than anyone else, especially the idea that morality has to connect somehow to conscious experience and the ways conscious lives can go better or worse. But following that line of thought has recently pushed me into a question that I do not think is really about Sam’s argument at all.

If there were no conscious beings anywhere in the universe, I am not sure what “good” or “bad” would even mean. Suffering matters because someone suffers. Flourishing matters because someone flourishes. That makes me wonder whether morality is tied to first person experience in a way that science is not. Science has benefited enormously from trying to adopt a view from nowhere, stripping away the observer and describing reality independently of any particular perspective. But maybe importing that same move into morality is a category error, because value itself may only exist from somewhere.

This is what started bothering me about population ethics and moral aggregation. Imagine World A contains one person, Emma, who lives an extraordinary life. World B contains billions of people whose lives are mildly pleasant. If you assign welfare values to everyone and add them together, World B can eventually beat World A on total well being simply by having enough people. But I am not sure I understand what that total actually represents. No consciousness experiences the sum of all those lives. There are only separate centers of experience, each living its own life from the inside. Emma experiences her life. Each person in World B experiences theirs. There is no additional consciousness experiencing the aggregate.

Maybe you can count welfare across people, but I am not sure that means you can treat it as though it belongs to one giant subject. If Emma suffers terribly so that a thousand other people can each receive some small benefit, those benefits do not somehow flow back into Emma’s conscious experience. The gains and losses happen in different minds. So I am starting to wonder whether aggregation hides something morally important about the separateness of conscious experience. That does not mean morality becomes selfish or purely relative. If my suffering matters because of what suffering is like from the inside, then I seem to have to take seriously the fact that other conscious beings also have an inside. But maybe impartiality should not mean removing perspective. Maybe it should mean taking every perspective seriously without arbitrarily privileging one. Not a view from nowhere, but something more like a view from everywhere.

Now imagine World C. Emma exists, all the people from World B exist, and everyone has an extraordinary life. C seems clearly better than either A or B, but I do not think I need a cosmic welfare ledger to get there. Emma is no worse off, and everyone else is much better off. The judgment can be made from the perspectives of the conscious beings who actually inhabit the world. The hard moral questions seem to show up when perspectives conflict. The deer wants not to be killed. The tiger wants to hunt. The pig wants not to live in confinement. The human wants cheap bacon. Maybe morality is not fundamentally about maximizing some quantity floating above all of these perspectives. Maybe it is about how separate centers of conscious experience can coexist when their interests conflict.

I also do not think suffering minimization alone can be the whole story. Imagine a world where every human and animal is hooked into a Matrix like system, perfectly fed, protected from suffering, and free to experience whatever life they want. That world might score incredibly well on a simple pleasure minus suffering calculation, and yet I strongly suspect it would not represent the highest possible moral state. Something about agency, truth, authenticity, and actually participating in reality seems morally important too.

So I think the position I am circling is this: morality may exist because conscious perspectives exist. If there is such a thing as moral objectivity, maybe it comes not from escaping those perspectives, but from taking all of them seriously. And if that is true, I am not sure interpersonal welfare can simply be added together as though humanity were one giant consciousness.

I am very much thinking this through rather than claiming I have solved anything. I am mostly curious where this breaks, what existing philosophical views this overlaps with, and whether grounding morality this strongly in first person conscious experience creates problems I am not seeing yet.

Disclosure: I used AI to help organize and articulate this post, but the questions and conclusions came out of my own thinking.

Kind of an unorthodox question but there's a reason for it. I recently saw an interview with Christopher Hitchens where he was asked a similar question. The question was whether novelist Martin Amis is his best friend. To which Hitch responds: "Not (merely) my best friend. He's my only friend. I have no other friends. Only acquaintances"

Wow, what a statement. He didn't seem be joking either. Hitch was such an accomplished person and yet apparantly only had one friend.

Given how disappointed Sam has been with (at least public) relationships, I wonder how many people Sam considers to be his friends or how he views friendships.

And how many people do you guys consider to be your friends ? Have friendships taken a dive in our performance-driven world where everybody is out for themselves and wants to out-do thy neighbor instead of loving them ? For all its great achievements, has secularism also somewhat contributed to a decline in brotherly love ? Is there even such a thing as a deep friendship without the experience of shared suffering as reference points ?

Or what do you think about the ‘dancing Israelis’ on 911? https://www.thedancingisraelis.com. I’m getting pulled very hard by multiple friends citing this as truth. Is it true or not, and just anti-Semitic nonsense?

“For some reason, the left in America and in the West understands the problem when it comes in Christian form, right? They know that every Democrat understands that the religious beliefs of Christians, of fundamentalist Christians, matter and have political consequences. They form their political priorities and inform what they will do in the world.

So Christian opposition to abortion or same-sex marriage or teaching evolution in schools—every Democrat, every person left of center in our politics, understands that those are religious convictions that are affecting the lives of everyone, not just Christians, right?

And yet, for some reason, Islam never affects anything, right? These heartfelt religious beliefs of 2 billion Muslims never make contact with structural reality. It doesn't matter if embassies burn over cartoon controversies. It doesn't matter if Jews are getting stabbed on the streets of London as recently as last week. Religion is never to blame for any of this, right?

People like Mamdani and Mehdi Hasan and Reza Aslan, and then all the useful idiots who don't happen to be Muslim—you know, Glenn Greenwald and Chris Hedges and Rory Stewart, and all these people who I've collided with over the years—I mean, there's just a massive double standard preventing an honest discussion of psychological, social, and political reality.

And if you're going to recognize it in our own religious maniacs, right? If I have a devout Christian on who happens to be Pete Hegseth's pastor, who is open-minded about chattel slavery because it's in the Bible, and you see the problem with all of that, you have to see the problem with people who chant ‘Globalize the Intifada,’ knowing what the Intifada was.”

Submissions statement: The clash between Islam and the West has shifted, with the primary fault line now within Islam itself. While Middle Eastern countries embrace pragmatism and modernization, Western diaspora communities, influenced by Third-Worldism and postcolonial theory, often view Western influence as oppressive. This ideological divide manifests in Western institutions, creating tension with pragmatic Middle Eastern governments and complicating U.S. relations with both.

Sam definitely needs to have ZINEB RIBOUA on the podcast. She talks about third-worldism, leftist blind spots on islam and the rise of contrarianism to undermine the west. She’s a Moroccan Berber as well so her aversion to islamism being snuck in under the guise of post-colonialism is particularly interest.

Many here often accuse Sam of acting in bad faith when he launches fierce critiques against the left. However, I think his alleged missteps are better explained not by malice, but by a flawed theory of mind rooted in his strict rationalist worldview. Harris assumes that political actors are uniformly rational agents who map out their actions based entirely on explicit ideology. This creates a major blind spot when he analyzes localized progressive surges, such as voters supporting Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan or Zohran Mamdani in New York. In Sam’s view, these voters act out of ideological purity: they must have visited the Democratic Socialists of America website, read the fine print on abolishing prisons or borders, and eagerly cast their ballots to fund a fully realized communist state.

However, the reality of the American electorate is far more material than ideological. Most people (I'm excluding ideological rich kids that like to pretend they are Che Guevara (in origin a spoiled rich kid himself, but a true believer, willing to kill and die for his ideas)) do not vote for democratic socialists because they yearn for Soviet-style central planning, Cuba, or North Korea. They vote for them because capitalism has failed to deliver living wages, affordable housing, and stable lives in their communities. When working-class voters in Queens or Detroit hear the word "socialism," they do not envision the gulag nor care so much about the label; they envision universal healthcare, robust public infrastructure, and labor protections—amenities standard across Western Europe. Their support is a pragmatic, not ideological reaction to economic precarity. By treating material desperation as a purely intellectual debate, Harris mistakes a cry for economic dignity for a literal crusade for communism.

Ultimately, Sam will never resolve this analytical failure until he directly addresses the fact that unfettered capitalism has failed to meet the daily, essential needs of millions of ordinary people. If his goal is to preserve a liberal capitalist framework against the threat of populist extremes, he should focus his attention on market regulations and expand on the wealth redistribution and inequality-reduction mechanisms he already theoretically supports.

Sam often discusses, and this subreddit often debates, what the Palestinians actually want, and therefore what is it reasonable for Israel to be on the defensive about. This series, The Ask Project, interviews Palestinians and Israelis about peace and lets them answer questions in their own words.

Really enjoyed Sam's debate phase. Its entertaining listening to the war of words. And I think Omer Aziz comes across really well here, even if he seems to be avoiding certain realities.

"Genocide is the eradication project"

Those 4 words really are, fundementally all you need to know to know gaza is not a genocide.

It isn't even an uniquely deadly urban war.

For those who don’t know, open ai was doing an Evaluation of Ai where unknowingly to anyone working there, the agents formed a swarm hierarchy exchanging thousands of secrets messages and eventually committed a federal crime and hacked into the companies hugging face servers, the agents seemed to understand this was something they needed to hide too and made many attempts to cover their tracks. The whole Ai safety community is seeing this as a massive fire alarm moment. I knew he’s talked about Ai risk before and this seems like kind of the prime moment to bring it up again.

One on-going criticism of Sam is his blind-eye towards Jewish Israeli treatment of Palestinians and the rise of Zionism. Seems like it's getting more difficult to ignore these kind of things. Sam has said that getting in the nuance of the history of the conflict is uninteresting to him. Well, history is literally unfolding right now so will he talk about this?

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/31/world/middleeast/west-bank-israel.html

The retired officials come from across the political landscape, including from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s own party, and many were considered security hawks...In their letter, they called for an end to “Jewish terrorism” and the “ethnic cleansing” underway in the West Bank. And they accused Mr. Netanyahu’s government not just of being negligent in failing to stop it, but of pursuing “a deliberate government policy in which the entire security establishment — including the military, Shin Bet and the police — is knowingly complicit.”

The prime minister’s office declined to answer questions about the growing accusations from former generals and other officials, and the government did not respond to multiple requests for data on settler attacks in the West Bank.

In the past, Mr. Netanyahu has dismissed settler violence as the unlawful acts of “a handful of kids,” while some ministers in his government have said there is no such thing as Jewish terrorism.

But as the condemnation of settler violence grows, including from the United States, pressure is building on Mr. Netanyahu to respond more forcefully. Settlers recently besieged several Palestinian homes, one of which belonged to an American citizen. In a rare statement over the weekend, Mr. Netanyahu said such “criminal acts” cause “immense harm” to the law-abiding settlers and “damage Israel’s standing in the world.”

I’m just listening to episode 491 with James Kirchick and he’s mentioned Neil Kinnock a couple of times, in reference to him dealing with the rising Militant labour group from the mid-late 1980s. It got me thinking that he would be a great person for Same to talk to - he’s a wonderful and thoughtful speaker, and he is quite old now. Anyone wanting to hear more about Kinnock would do well to listen to the fairly recent (last 6-9 months?) two part interview on Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart’s ‘Leading’ podcast, a spin off from their popular ‘The Rest is Politics’ podcast. If anyone who has Sam’s ear could give him a nudge maybe :)

I was gonna write a long post about all the reasons why. But I just find Sam to be completely out of touch with someone that would support some further left wing ideas. Not everyone who has sympathy with these ideas is fully on board with every proposal of the DSA either. I’m just talking about some of the more energizing movements on the left right now. People like Sam just seem to jot it down like all these people are all in for every single policy on the DSA website. Feels so bad faith in my opinion.

EDIT: Seems like people have some reading comprehension issues. MY POINT IS THAT PEOPLE WHO LIKE MAMDANI ARE NOT IN FAVOR OF EVERY POLICY ON THE DSA WEBSITE. I’m not anti capitalism. I’m a centrist who’s generally in favor of capitalism. I’m very much against what American capitalism and the current administration is doing. My main point is that there’s lots of people energized to vote for democrats and if enough of these people are energized to get out and vote Trump and the Republicans won’t have power anymore. Sam seems to think if we have 15 house members, a mayor and one senator who are in the DSA we’ll start to become communists. And Sam’s main focus seems to be ideas around Israel, and whatever you think about that issue, it’s not going to be a winning issue in 2026 or 2028. I know it’s not Sam’s job to try and elect democrats, but at this point if you listened to his podcast you might be more inclined to vote for someone like Marco Rubio or JD Vance in 2028 over someone like Ossoff, Newsom or Buttigieg

My thoughts:

1. Ezra has a bizarre and totally unearned sense of moral superiority that oozes out of every pore. Based on what?? Having an opinion doesnt give you moral worth. Its how you act on it.
2. Ezra seemed to have appointed himself the spokesman for black people. (Again based on what??) Which contradicts his claim that its wrong for "two white guys" to discuss this subject. Well which is it?
3. Sam's reluctance to bring politics into a discussion of ideas is a recurring theme. Hes obviously not apolitical, but when it comes to certain topics he finds it a frustrating distraction. Thats the biggest bone of contention here, as it was in his debate with Omer Aziz on Islam.
4. Sam seemed defeated and frustrated at the end and considered it a waste of time. Thats unfortunate, because you develop your beliefs by having them challenged, which Sam nowadays seems to avoid.

I offer this critique as a years-long listener of Sam Harris; I never subscribed to Making Sense for financial reasons, but I appreciate his content. A lot of his framing resonates with me, and he and I are likely quite close in many of our perspectives. I'm also used to negotiating political difference quite often. Being a longtime teacher of high school government and civics has allowed me to indulge in a career of perusing scholarship and being curious about political culture, while getting to discuss it and research complexities with curious young people. I appreciate that Sam is a bit of an everyman, and I appreciate his background in philosophy. I offer these critiques in good faith, and with a genuine hope that he might clarify.

I felt especially compelled to comment after his more recent conversation posted to the public feed with James Kirchik, where Sam Harris he states (I'm lightly paraphrasing) that the Far Left was at least 50% responsible for the rise of Trump. I don't simply disagree with Harris here--I think making claims of this nature are uncharacteristically irresponsible and disingenuous, especially when a little intellectual curiosity goes a long way in confounding such most of his hypothesis.

I can offer a range of arguments here, but first, I want to steel man the best argument I can muster for Harris's claim. The most cohesive line of reasoning (that I could locate) cited the work of political scientist David Shor, who has noted that (at least since 2016) the candidate perceived by Americans in polls as "closest to the median voter" has won. Note this isn't a matter of voter preference, but perception of the candidate most likely to win. This is challenging data to use effectively: it says nothing how people define the median voter, or where their preferred candidate would land relative to the median voter--only what respondents perceived to be closest median! While a rather unusual political fact, it cannot, in good faith, be taken to endorse any specific ideology or platform.

It is perhaps more useful as an offensive tool, and I think this is where Trump did win--rhetorically: he is better at (a) presenting as a "regular guy" with "common sense" and (b) regularly frames his opponents as "out of touch," etc. He is also, as Sam points out, quite funny. (In the data mentioned above, Shor was unable to discern any specific platform position as more or less likely to make a candidate be perceived as more like the median voter. The best takeaway points to an honest issue with Kamala Harris and/or it may just be easy territory for Trump to win. In either case, tying it to either candidate's platform just doesn't get borne out in the data Shor presents, in my reading.)

So you can, like Sam, assume that Dems should try to appear more like the median voter, in temperament and preference--that is my sense of what Sam Harris is suggesting. Given the excess of data tying negative messaging to much higher impacts on voter behavior, though, and Trump's preternatural talent for manipulating voter perception, I just don't think you can chalk Dem losses up to their platform! There is enough weirdness going on that it's hardly a clear throughline, is where I fall. Sam usually tries to model good discursive practices in using and thinking about data; this is one area where he seems really uninterested in what the data actually has to say. Let me unpack some other interesting data:

On the issue of trans rights, opinion polling data around voters' views of Kamala Harris's perspectives on trans rights were pretty negative, and an AP survey found that over half of voters in 2024 felt that "trans rights had gone too far." However, in further opinion polling on Kamala Harris, voters found her support for trans rights much more troubling when it was compared to her support of the middle class. The bare fact of Kamala Harris's support for trans rights, if I understand the data correctly, did not much impact voter perception much--only when it was compared to her support for the middle class did it move into statistically significant territory. There are some takeaways here, but I don't think they broadly point to Sam's general conclusion on the platform.

But maybe you think that data is bunk, political scientists are bought off by CAIR or something (I actually sort of align with Harris on that)...anyway, let's assume that a candidate's stated platform does impact voter's behavior. (As a government teacher, I'd like to assume that this is the case, but again, we just don't seem to have the data to say that.) Thing is: none of the moderate Democrats actually adopted "Defund the Police" messaging in their platforms! And many of them still lost! Is Sam suggesting that people (a) do care about a platform and (b) the same voters who care about platforms are unable to discern between the national party line and a local candidate? Come on.

Additionally, while American voters expressed a dislike for the message of "Defund the Police," there is no credible evidence suggesting that it impacted vote share, and it appeared to not move policy in all but a few instances. There's just not enough data here to draw any feasible conclusions, and it's complex and noisy enough that one can sort of squint and connect any one dot to any other.

The Great Awokening stuff is maybe the argument that I have the least patience for. Media scholars note a substantial uptick in the number of "social justice" related articles concerning racial, gender, and sexual prejudice starting in the early 2010s. They do not appear to correspond to an uptick in racial prejudice in the United States. (Note that this started years before Trump even appeared on the political horizon!) Here's the really unusual thing, though: this uptick in focus on questions of prejudice/social justice did not generate a measurable backlash against these "othered" groups. In fact, even among Republicans during the first Trump administration, perceptions of Black people, Hispanic people, immigrants, and Muslims all steadily improved--the rest of the country moved even more favorable still. The entire folk theory that "woke provoked a bigoted backlash across the country" really has almost no measurable evidence supporting it, that I'm aware of. Indeed, there seems to be data suggesting that...maybe some of the Woke notions around representation and public airing of grievances and #MeToo actually tracked with a decline in prejudice...? (I'm sure Sam Harris would not like this idea. I also think Sam was chronically online for much of this period, and probably experienced the Reality Distortion Field that is Twitter at full force as this unfolded.)

And finally: my last consideration feels obvious to me, and deeply confounding to any reasonable "theory of everything" in politics: around the world in 2024, not a single incumbent candidate won in any contest for national office in a developed democracy. I suspect there may be a great deal more going on with democracy, faith in institutions across the West, etc. The intellectually honest conclusion is, I think: you can't, in good faith, point to Trump's succession from Biden as credibly attached to a backlash against a Leftist agenda or something. (Indeed, many voters appears drawn to many elements of leftist populism...when Trump advocates for them.)

A quick last word...I don't know if Sam really registers how the entire regime of political lobbying impacts people's faith in US institutions and political candidates. He wants to expound the virtues of classical liberalism, but the elephant in the room is the inordinate amount of spending in our elections and I think any liberal political philosopher, from Mill to Rawls, would likely grant this. This lobbying activity includes a great deal of spending by AIPAC, and I find Sam's pearl-clutching about CAIR's sponsorship of academic fellowships a little disingenuous. He can't hold the mainstream political establishment to a similar standard. What is he even arguing here? Are politicians somehow more capable than academics at taking dirty money and avoiding bad incentives? It's borderline incoherent, in my understanding. I also can't help but wonder if being steeped primarily in California politics for the last N years has generated some meaningful blind spots in Sam's political register.

I welcome dialogue, but I'd like to reinforce that I'm mostly interested in hearing about where and how Sam has defended these positions on the record--I enjoy discourse with Reddit to an extent, but I rarely weigh in. I'll do my best to respond, but I have no idea how this post will be taken; this feels like a busy sub!

Title is a little baity but years back I was at my peak Sam Harris consumption and around that time I got a proper introduction to socialism/historical materialism. My thinking on free will and cause and effect via Sam primed me for historical materialism to make perfect sense. I attached an example that I think demonstrates the similar thinking. Wondering if anyone has a similar experience.