The Most Absurd Dataset I’ve Ever Seen and A Troubling Truth About Liberation

About this episode

The episode explores the complexities of violence in the pursuit of liberation, challenging the notion that nonviolent movements are always more effective.

The attitudes in American on Israel and Palestine have flipped, we can't ignore the fact that violence may have "worked."There’s a deeply uncomfortable question at the center of political history: is violence ever justified—or even necessary—in the pursuit of freedom? In a widely shared debate, Steven Pinker argues that nonviolent movements are not only more moral, but more effective, citing a dataset from Harvard’s Kennedy School as empirical proof. But when you actually examine that data, the argument starts to unravel. In this essay, I take a close look at how complex resistance movements are reduced to simplistic binaries—success or failure, violent or nonviolent—and how that kind of “counting” can distort reality to produce clean, convenient conclusions... which might be very wrong.Along the way, I explore the psychology of cognitive dissonance, the narratives we build to justify violence, and the difficulty—perhaps impossibility—of measuring something like liberation. This isn’t an argument in favor of violence, but a challenge to the idea that history, morality, and revolution can be neatly captured in a spreadsheet.00:00 Intro00:47 Is Violence Ever…

People in this episode

Host: Jay Shapiro

Topics covered

• violence and liberation
• nonviolent movements
• cognitive dissonance
• political history
• resistance movements

Keywords

• violence
• liberation
• nonviolence
• cognitive dissonance
• political history
• resistance movements
• Harvard dataset

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Harvard’s Kennedy School

Places: Palestine

More episodes of Dilemma Podcast

• Trita Parsi on Iran, Israel, Zionism, and America Finding It's Limits in Iran · June 3, 2026 · 55 min
• DEBATE: Did Zionism Steal Judaism? | Joshua and Amalek | The Jewish God | Animals and Morality · May 26, 2026 · 2h 46m
• Why This Holocaust Survivor Is So RARE In His Opposition to Zionism w/ Stephen Kapos · May 15, 2026 · 1h 33m
• Is There Something Modernity Refuses to See? | Justin Smith-Ruiu · May 12, 2026 · 1h 56m
• Deepfakes, AI Influencers, and Why Verification Is Failing · April 30, 2026 · 1h 19m
• Elon Musk, The 22-Point Manifesto, "Muskism" & Tech's Antihumanism Philosophy | Tarnoff & Slobodian · April 28, 2026 · 1h 26m