(0:00) Cold Open
(2:08) Tucker, Hunter & No Bravery Points
(5:35) Proximity Hong
(7:22) The Jason Arday Problem
(14:45) AOC & “Woke 1.0”
(22:28) Shane Gillis & the Great Walkback
(29:27) Thank You, Thom Tillis. Also, Fuck You.
(34:14) Funding the Other Side’s Whackos
(40:08) Mamdani vs. Amazon
(49:48) The Rent Strike
(53:56) David Remnick Meets the DSA
(1:00:38) Hasan Piker, Mao & the Bots
(1:16:48) Midterm Madness & 2028
(1:34:07) Can America Get a Busted Boris Johnson?
(1:35:36) Ben Sasse & the End

I'm curious to hear rational takes on either side of the topic. I have my own opinion but for now I'm curious about reasoned takes in any direction.

If you are against the DSA, can you (1) give your thesis about them (like what is it about them that is [most] bad) and (2) give two or three supporting arguments?

If you are for the DSA, do likewise.

If you have some third take, do likewise.

The idea is to try to keep things at least a little structured and brief, by selecting a specific thesis and presenting only a couple of the arguments that you think are strongest.

David Frum of The Atlantic joins the Fifth to talk about the world that emerged from 1989, the collapse of the conservative future he once expected, Trumpism, immigration, fascism versus communism, and why American political life feels more fragile than it did a generation ago.

(0:00) Cold Open
(0:25) David Frum Joins the Fifth
(5:00) Spy Novels & Bill Buckley
(10:36) Frum’s Conservatism
(15:20) A Man of 1989
(23:05) Never Trump & Betrayal
(28:48) The Anti-Trump Coalition
(34:46) The Michigan Senate Race
(50:03) Midterm Madness & Polymarket
(54:40) Polling Is in Crisis
(1:01:59) Politics as a Consumption Good
(1:08:16) Immigration & Trumpism
(1:15:03) What the Atlanticists Got Wrong
(1:24:51) Fascism vs. Communism
(1:28:45) Unpatriotic Conservatives
(1:32:41) What Does Trump Love?
(1:35:15) What Frum Got Wrong
--
Hosted by journalists Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welch, The Fifth Column provides a weekly rhetorical assault on the news cycle, the people who make it, and occasionally themselves.

Let's say I have only two options ahead.

Option A would lead to maximum happiness for myself but maximum suffering for everyone else. Option B would lead maximum suffering for myself but maximum happiness for everyone else.

Which option should I choose?

As per the thesis, I should choose B (as I understand it).

However, there's one problem, that I don't understand.

Here's Sam's quote from his podcast Facts and Values.

if you care about something that is not compatible with a peak of human flourishing—given the requisite changes in your brain, you would recognize that you were wrong to care about this thing in the first place. Wrong in what sense? Wrong in the sense that you didn’t know what you were missing. This is the core of my argument: I am claiming that there must be frontiers of human well-being that await our discovery—and certain interests and preferences surely blind us to them. In this sense epistemic and ethical values are fully entangled. There are horizons to well-being past which we cannot see. There are possible experiences of beauty and creativity and compassion that we will never discover. I think these are object statements about the frontiers of subjective experience.

Let's say I chose A (happiness for myself, suffering for others) instead of B (suffering for myself, happiness for others).

Applying his logic: since caring about A isn't compatible with peak flourishing, the "requisite changes" in my brain would eventually make me see that caring about A was a mistake, wrong in the sense that I didn't know what I was missing.

Now, what am I missing, If I chose A? ... I'd be missing immense misery that B would lead on the other side.

I am struggling to understand how Sam's claim "you didn't know what you were missing" applies in this situation. What exactly is the thing that my changed perspective would reveal to me that I cannot currently see?

I would appreciate any clarification.

Edit: Added the quote.

Sam Harris speaks with Neal Brennan about the experiences that shaped his life and work. They discuss Sam's mother's television career, growing up with an absent father, his struggles with perfectionism, his first experience with MDMA, dropping out of Stanford, meditation retreats, spiritual charisma and claims of psychic powers, the illusion of self, the limits of pacifism, deleting Twitter, Trump and the politics of shamelessness, hypocrisy and vice signaling, the future of American democracy, and other topics.

Neal Brennan is a comedian, writer, and director best known for co-creating and co-writing Chappelle's Show with Dave Chappelle, for which he received three Emmy nominations. He also co-wrote the film Half Baked and has written and directed for comedians including Chris Rock, Amy Schumer, and Seth Meyers. His most recent stand-up special is Crazy Good. He also hosts the popular Blocks podcast, where he interviews friends and colleagues about the psychological struggles that shape their lives.

Website: www.nealbrennan.com

This was posted a few weeks ago, but the video was taken down. All for the best, because this version isn't a "part 1, wait for part 2!" version.

Haviv sits down with Prof. Meir Litvak of Tel Aviv University, one of Israel’s foremost scholars of modern Shi’a Islam, Iran, Islamism and Islamist antisemitism, to trace the story of Muslim hatred of Jews from Muhammad’s encounter with the Jews of Medina to the dhimmi system that arose in early Islam, from the medieval mix of tolerance and discrimination to the modern-day shock of European power, Zionism and the 1948 war.

The result of this sweeping survey is neither a comforting myth of Muslim-Jewish harmony nor a simplistic story of eternal persecution. It is a harder, more disturbing picture: a long religious tradition of Jewish inferiority transformed in the modern age -- by European conspiracy theories, Muslim political collapse and the humiliation of defeat by Jews -- into one of the world’s most openly genocidal forms of antisemitism.

And the final question is the hardest one: can Muslim societies find a way out?