The Good Fight

Excellent show!

Yascha is the kind of interviewer that more popular podcast hosts should aspire to be. He gently but clearly challenges assumptions and theories to tease apart causation and correlation, all while keeping the guest from feeling threatened. For the listener, we get to drill down deeper into the essence of a subject thanks to this approach. Thanks and keep em coming!

I am a leftist, or whatever. I’m pretty sure there isn’t any true threat to the advancement of political ideas and philosophies that have been under attack from cancel culture; I tend to find that framing of accountability the more ordinary means of deflection over reflection. It also gets nowhere, because it is guided only by the false pretense of “seeing truths and challenging assumptions” as it’s purpose and, in that way, is perpetually unsatisfied and wanting. I agree with Mounk here and there, and I generally end up listening by accident, my feed rolls to this one because Saturdays are more light in terms of offerings. All of which is to say: there are any number of reasons for me to delete this podcast, I likely will. And it’s also true that not a single reason motivates that choice in as far as I’ve yet found. Maybe the gut works here before the reason: I just read Mr Mounk as a bit uninspired, as a bit of a trope of the thoughtful, ever so softly worded misogynistic learned philosopher who knows that he knows it better than you, but invites you in to discover this, not in all episodes but most that’s the vibe. It’s arrogance and spite, it’s so sure that it’s the opposite of that that surely the world is its cancel antagonist. TLDR: just don’t, you’ll just feel sad.

Yascha wrote an article ‘The Deep Roots of the Left’s Deafening Silence on Hamas’ on Oct 16, 2023. The title says it all. The attack killed 1200 Israelis and as far as I know every member of the elected Left of the Democratic Party immediately criticized it. There were some corners of the internet that didn’t and they were rightly castigated. Now, the date I am writing this is July 24, 2024. It has been 291 days since Israel began its genocidal campaign in Gaza. Roughly 40k Gazans are killed. Tens of thousands of more are believed to be dead under the rubble. The after-effects of this war can cause hundreds of thousands of more deaths. Yet, Yascha has not published an article condemning this carnage nor did he make a case to stop sending more military aid to Israel. Neither has a condemnation come from so-called Centrists or the Right. The Deep Roots of Yascha’s Deafening Silence on the Gazan Genocide are not a mystery. It is the essence of his thinking that uses intellectual sophistication as a mask to his base instincts of racism. Shame and hypocrisy are words that can’t be found in Yascha’s dictionary