Lex Fridman: preference

Transcript context

…No, I’m saying it might be genuine by some people. I’m not saying it’s necessarily not. I’m saying that when there’s a lot of people who are saying the opposite, it doesn’t seem like it’s consistently genuine from the entire Israeli leadership class. And that even if it is genuine when some people say it, that’s kind of not enough to get away from the fact that… When Tucker was on Pierce Morgan, he said the thing, he goes, “I don’t like my tax dollars being used to intentionally kill children.” And a lot of people really objected to that word, intentionally, because I think so many of the defenders of Israel fall behind this. Like, “No, no, no, that’s not intentional, we’re just trying to kill Hamas.” But again, like I said, we would never accept that standard in a domestic murder case. The thing is that, if you know there are kids there and you know they’re going to die, then that’s intent. I think I agree with you fundamentally because war is hell, and that’s why I’m against war. But there is a difference. So I think we’re mixing in a lot of things. I think you’re fundamentally against war, and that’s why to you, it really doesn’t matter. It is murder. It’s just murder, and we shouldn’t do murder. And there’s a lot of democracies with colorful flags that justify murder because they’re trying very hard not to kill civilians. And then when you say you look at the reality of the Obama administration, the entirety of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, you’re murdering civilians. Yes, you’re trying to kill bad guys, but you’re murdering civilians. That said, on an ethical consideration on which kind of ideals, ideologies you can build a society after the war. One that even on the surface levels states that the value of every life, of every civilian life is equal and high in value. That’s a good society. That’s the concern with extremist ideology that basically is very difficult to build a flourishing society on. But then the argument against that is the one you said, which is, yeah, well, Hamas is really supported now because of the war. Right. But by the way, I don’t disagree with the first part of your statement there, I just don’t think it’s in conflict with what I’m stating. Look, I understand first of all, that there is a difference between the way you’re going to say prosecute crime domestically within your own country, and the way you can prosecute crime or a war between two different countries, right? Maybe it’s not exactly the same. You don’t have cops that you can just send in, you can’t arrest somebody and put them on trial. It’s not the same, so fine you could say. But the point I’m making is more like, I’m just saying how we would think about these things in a domestic setting. We’re talking about morality here. And morality by its very nature, it rises above logistics, it rises above nationalities, or governments, or borders, or any of those things, what’s right or wrong. If it’s wrong to rape somebody in New Jersey, it’s also wrong to rape somebody in Central Africa. And so I’m just saying you’re committing the same act that we would consider murder in the first degree here. And then just to go one step further, I think particularly part of the reasons why people have different attitudes about the way two nations fight, what we think of as war versus what we think as say a policing issue. We would never accept the idea that, the logic that’s used in wars, used in World War II, even used in Iraq and Afghanistan, especially used in the war in Gaza. If there was a bad guy, even a guy who had done something like October 7th, which we have school shooters and things like that here. If there was an active duty school shooter, and he’s in a school shooting people, and we know he is already killed 25 people-…

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