Dilemma Podcast

Is Israel entering a period of irreversible transformation?In this conversation, I sit down with Israeli historian and author Ilan Pappé to discuss his latest book, Israel on the Brink. Instead of looking backward, Pappé looks forward — imagining what the collapse of political Zionism could mean and what might replace it.We talk about the growing rift he describes as the “State of Judea” vs the “State of Israel,” the reported 270,000 Israelis who have left, the possibility of a one-democratic state by 2048, and whether international pressure — from the U.S., Europe, or the Global South — could fundamentally shift the trajectory.We also tackle difficult territory: U.S. politics, lobbying power, accusations of antisemitism, the Epstein discourse, and whether Israel’s strategic alliances are becoming more cynical and less moral.Is this a slow reform? A violent rupture? Or something no one is prepared for?This is a serious, nuanced discussion about power, legitimacy, and what history tells us about how states unravel — and rebuild.00:00:00 Coming Up...00:02:02 Intro: Israel on the Brink00:05:54 State of Judea vs State of Israel00:12:23 22 More Years... Really!?00:20:33 The United Nations and the Board of Peace00:26:55 Changing American Support00:33:15 Epstein, Israel, Judaism00:45:40 Antisemitism and Antizionism00:52:47 Annexation of The West Bank and War with IranBECOME A MEMBER - MONTHLY MEMBERS ONLY LIVESTREAM https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5NIku35U9thGG9WBJjE0sw/joinFor more from Jay visit whatjaythinks.com

The Case of Steven Pinker and Alan Dershowitz, John Brockman and Sam Harris and a culture of "accepting" the culture...00:00 Clearing up the Brockman Point02:55 Allergic to Conspiracy05:07 Moral Questions are not Legal Questions10:40 Morality and Opportunity of Association12:50 The Case of Steven Pinker15:01 Alan Dershowitz Asks Pinker for Advice23:58 What Could Pinker Know?28:36 What Can We Do?32:00 It's Not About YOU33:11 MeToo Again?34:17 Influence, Power, Men, and SexFor more from Jay visit whatjaythinks.com

What if our most “rational,” science-minded moral frameworks are quietly justifying violence, domination, and erasure? In this video essay, I trace David Hume’s is–ought problem and follow a secular, compassionate, scientific worldview to its unsettling conclusions — from free will skepticism and utilitarian ethics to the “quarantine model” of justice, effective altruism, and systems that treat human suffering like a technical problem to be optimized. Along the way, we confront hurricanes, checkpoints, drowning children, colonialism, capitalism, Zionism, Palestine, and the limits of treating human beings like weather systems.This isn’t a rejection of reason or science — it’s a critique of how scientism, ascended in many popular thinkers like Sam Harris, Peter Singer, and even Sam Bankman-Fried, can be captured by power. We examine how good intentions, clean logic, and abstract models can end up endorsing moral nightmares. The question isn’t whether these arguments are smart — it’s what gets lost when suffering becomes a math problem, tragedy becomes an acceptable cost, and rational people stop asking who pays the price.00:00 Intro to Scientism01:27 Part 1: Imminent Danger02:34 Part 2: Consciousness & Moral Concern08:47 Part 3: Taking Action12:12 Part 4: The Problems12:33 Problem 1: Causality15:14 Problem 2: Distal & Systemic18:45 Problem 3: Entrenching Power23:34 Problem 4: Genuine Flourishing28:13 Part 5: ConclusionsALL MUSIC BY https://michigan25yearsago.bandcamp.com/BECOME A MEMBER - MONTHLY MEMBERS ONLY LIVESTREAM https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5NIku35U9thGG9WBJjE0sw/joinFor more from Jay visit whatjaythinks.com

Robert Sapolsky makes one of the strongest cases against free will on offer today—but this conversation doesn’t stop at whether free will exists. It asks what follows. If no one could have done otherwise, what happens to morality, justice, dignity, and meaning? Hosted by Jay Shapiro, this episode begins with Sapolsky’s core argument against free will and moves quickly into its consequences: shame, pride, punishment, and the temptation to replace moral responsibility with clean, mechanistic explanations. The question isn’t whether determinism is true—it’s whether we actually know how to live with it.Shapiro presses Sapolsky on an inverse worry often missing from incompatibilist debates: not the fear of losing free will, but the fear of escaping it. Drawing on Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, the conversation explores whether rejecting free will can feel less like a tragedy and more like a cosmic relief—an escape from ambiguity, moral difficulty, and the burden of judgment. From there, the discussion turns to narrative, illusion, and meaning, engaging Wilfrid Sellars’s famous distinction between the scientific image and the manifest image of humanity. Are we making a mistake by treating narrative, responsibility, and moral language as expendable “illusions,” rather than as real features of human life that still matter even if they aren’t metaphysically ultimate?The conversation culminates in hard political and ethical cases—power, punishment, and the danger of focusing on proximal threats while ignoring distal causes. Using examples ranging from criminal justice to Israel–Palestine, Sapolsky and Shapiro debate the limits of the “quarantine model” and whether determinism risks being quietly hijacked by existing power structures. Can science describe causality without erasing dignity? Can morality survive without free will? And if humans are, as Sapolsky argues, recursive biological machines—what kind of responsibility, humility, and restraint does that actually demand of us?00:00:00 Coming up…00:01:22 Intro My Gripes with the Incompatibilists00:05:30 The Elevator Pitch Against Free Will00:07:52 Do We Really Want Free Will?00:12:43 Are Illusions Real?00:16:07 Meaning Without Free Will00:19:29 Replacing God with an Indifferent Universe for the Same Reasons?00:23:01 A Giant Naturalistic Fallacy?00:26:12 What to Quarantine? The “IDF” or a Palestinian Teenager?00:31:39 Proximal versus Distal Causes, the Palestinian Knife or Ideologies Like Zionism?00:34:43 Does the Quarantine Model Fizzle Out or Get Hijacked?00:42:19 Sellars, Philosopher and Scientists, And The Pact of Forgetting00:51:54 The Scientism and Utilitarianism’s Failure on Palestine, Sam Harris’s Mistakes00:54:58 Thomas Hobbes and Rousseau on Human Nature01:00:33 Free Enough Will, The Human Condition, and Engineering our Nature01:05:05 Walls as Quarantines and the Worry of Palantir01:10:56 Be Suspicious of The Desire for a Simple Diagnosis01:17:36 Connecting On Palestine and Escaping Through The Maze of UtilitarianismReferences…Wilfrid Sellars. Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man https://danielwharris.com/teaching/380/readings/Sellars.pdfRebecca Newberger Goldstein. The Philosophers and the Scientists Should be Friends https://secularhumanism.org/2017/12/cont-the-scientists-and-the-philosophers-should-be-friends/Johann Hari. Chasing the Scream. https://chasingthescream.com/Johann Hari. Lost Connections. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34921573-lost-connectionsThomas Hobbes Levitation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_(Hobbes_book)Daniel Dennett and Gregg Caruso. Just Desserts https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Just+Deserts%3A+Debating+Free+Will-p-9781509545759Robert Sapolsky Father Offspring Conversations (that Warthog Story) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WhXs8_-kqU BECOME A MEMBER - MONTHLY MEMBERS ONLY LIVESTREAM https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5NIku35U9thGG9WBJjE0sw/joinFor more from Jay visit whatjaythinks.com

In this episode I speak with Melani McAlister, professor of American Studies and International Affairs at George Washington University and author of the remarkable new book Promises Then the Storm — a journal she began on October 5th, 2023.This conversation moves through her life story: • growing up an evangelical Christian in North Carolina • discovering Amnesty International, human rights work, and the Middle East in 1982 • learning Arabic in Cairo • joining Mobilization for Survival in the late 1980s • working with queer and feminist organizers • being listed by the ADL as a “hate group” simply for recognizing the PLO • teaching the U.S. as an empire to a changing generation of students• Palestinian Poetry as ResistanceWe discuss Christian Zionism, the shifting landscape on American campuses, the rise of the alt-right, the weaponization of antisemitism, and why Palestine now resonates with Black, South Asian, Latino, and other marginalized communities.Melani argues that the human rights era has collapsed, that Gaza revealed the hypocrisy at the center of the old world order, and that what comes next must be a planetary consciousness rooted in ecology, sustainability, and the dignity of all people.At the end, Melani reads from one of the most powerful entries in her book — a passage I’ve set to original music from a close friend. Please stay for that.Melani’s book: Promises Then the Storm https://www.amazon.com/Promises-Then-...Music: https://michigan25yearsago.bandcamp.com/00:00 Coming Up…01:08 Palestine Exhaustion and McAlister’s Book06:55 Growing Up Evangelical to 1982 Israel Invasion of Lebanon10:45 The Christian Zionism Puzzle Piece13:40 McAlister Drops Messianic Christianity14:53 On Being a “Good Girl” and Religiosity17:57 Obiedence of Suicide Bombers19:02 Media Sources as American Zionist “Doctrine”21:52 The Next Wave of Protests23:53 McAlister’s Activist Path through Amnesty, MOBE, Academia31:59 Addressing Antisemitism, Living in Berlin, the Collapse of the Right36:04 The Legacy of the Jewish Left39:05 Judaism from Zionism and Israel40:35 A Journal Passage on Antisemitism44:04 Forgetting about Antisemitism and Weaponizing Antisemitism47:22 Palestinian Poetry, Darwish, and Anger50:03 “Identity Card”50:38 How Students Have Changed After Gaza57:00 Self Determination Beyond the Nation-State1:02:17 Oppressor-Oppressed Narratives1:06:05 Palestine is the Symbolic Center of the Decolonizing Struggle1:16:38 The End of the United Nations?1:20:25 We Should All Write Diaries1:22:30 October 14th. Free Palestine.