Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…study paid for by the Israelis that we were going to topple seven countries in five years.” And we didn’t get there in five years, but we’ve made attempts to topple all of those countries since then. You see Trump’s bombing the Houthis because they’re pissed off about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, and so they’re trying to shut down their straits or whatever. So we’re just bombing another group on behalf of Israel. And if you really are concerned about the rise of Jew hatred, I would say, look, sometimes people would argue, the thing I said in the beginning about the terrorists don’t hate us for our freedom, they hate us because we’re over there. And people would say, “That’s just what Osama Bin Laden says.” He just says he hates us for our military, but he really just hates us because he’s an Islamist and we’re free people or whatever. And you’d be like, “Okay, well even if that’s what’s in his heart, that sure is his recruiting shtick. That sure is how he gets other people to blow themselves up.” And so even if you want to say, which might very well be the case, that some of these people just hate Jews, and it wouldn’t matter if Israel was at war with Gaza or not. It’s like, okay, but that sure is their recruiting shtick. That sure is how they get other people to go look at what these Jews are doing in our foreign policy. So I don’t know. There’s a lot going on. I think racialism of all different forms is stupid and wrong. It always just leads to sloppy thinking and bad results, it’s always kind of ugly. And then weirdly, it also always ends up hurting the person, it’s not good for you, it’s not good for your soul. So I don’t like seeing that stuff. I was saying before about there’s this hierarchy of outrage that you got to have in order to think and act, you have to kind of put these together. It’s something that, despite being described as a self-hating Jew, I am really not. I love Jewish people, I love Jewish culture. I’ve benefited a lot from it. It’s in many ways made me the person I am, and I think it’s influenced some of the best parts of me. But there is a whininess and a hysteria about this stuff that I think is just not healthy. I think it’s not good. I’ve told many Jewish friends and family this privately, but the way I look at it is like, I’m an American, this has been a wonderful country to be Jewish. Jews are doing exceptionally well in this country. We are 2% of the population or so, and we are thriving by any metric. And if mean stuff on Twitter is our great burden to bear, I don’t think we should be talking about it like we’re in the middle of Nazi Germany or something like that. So I do think people get hysterical about it. In a way that’s completely not productive. But to me, I think of the Jew-hating nerds and trolls on Twitter as just the other side of the woke. … And trolls on Twitter is just the other side of the woke leftist. I kind of get that, yeah.…

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