Moses S.

@ShanuMathew93 Following your ghastly Airbnb story, now this… time to come back to US! Hope you don’t shift to UK grid analysis ;)

No free water in the UK gym, wtf?!

@noam_dworman Well said. I heard you answer this to the snide call-in question. Among the most ‘bad faith’ topics when invoked against Israel. What’s your view—as a moral & prudential matter—on how Israel should deal w/ its hostage dilemma? Maybe I’ll call in (do live pods outside work hours!)

Got annoyed thinking about Mearsheimer.

@tylercowen @danwwang Best of the year!

My Conversation with the excellent Dan Wang, conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/dan-w…, #China, #Breakneck, #Cowenconvos, @DanWWang

@noam_dworman @havivrettiggur I chose those words carefully! Haviv is the GOAT in offering the Israeli history, psyche, context, depth, and moral framing. But in seeking truth via debate and iterative, reflexive questioning of one’s own ‘side’ you take that gold medal. Anyway, thanks again - keep it going!

@mosessutton89 Thank you!!! I'll settle for top 10... There are some others, and nobody can approach @havivrettiggur

Two new podcasts up. 1. Moumen al-Natour (@MoumALnatour) anti-Hamas dissident, live from Gaza, 2. Yaakov Katz (@yaakovkatz) discusses his new book on 10.7: "While Israel Slept".

@noam_dworman What an incredible episode. How you’ve become the leading voice/place on thoughtful I/P internet discourse is something unreal to have witnessed (I’ve watched every episode). כל הכבוד.

@TheRestHistory @dcsandbrook This was so delightful! Requesting more Tabby, in general, in the main podcast.

A real treat for our members with Producer Tabby discussing the ins and outs of the Hobbit with @dcsandbrook! Link for members sign up in replies👇

@EconTalker This year it was very hard, more than in the past, to pick just 5! I guess it’s a sign of how strong these episodes were. Thanks for another fantastic year. Maybe it’s time to change the official name from EconTalk to the subtitle “Conversations for the Curious”

Vote for your favorite EconTalk episodes of 2024! (And please RT): surveymonkey.com/r/KYV5XPG

@cowenconvos @tylercowen @Jeff_Holmes I must know, is the average listener making it thru 2/3, then dropping? What’s the shape of the distribution? If it’s half listen to ~all and half are tourists listening to just a bit, okay. But devoted fans actually quitting 2/3 in?? Makes no sense to me (as a devoted fan).

Merry Christmas! On this special year-in-review episode, @tylercowen and producer @Jeff_Holmes look back on the past year in the show, field listener questions, review Tyler’s pop culture picks from 2014, and mull over ideas for what to call all you listeners. Here’s Tyler and Jeff covering the most popular and most underrated episodes this year, including @FareedZakaria, @paulajaynebyrne, and @chrismkirchhoff.

@noam_dworman @TheOmniLiberal Solid Jan 6 debate. Steve won on pure facts—details, timelines, dispelling weak counter-arguments, trail of motives Nov-Jan (I think he has a docu coming). But Noam, you won on analysis. On balance of Trump’s path of denial, the psyche, the awful glee at the chaos. Great chat.

Destiny, aka Steven Bonnel, aka (@TheOmniLiberal ), and I debated January 6th and whether Trump intentionally incited violence. We had many long arcane digressions, so this is edited. The entire interview is coming. Steven is one of my favorite guests ever.

@highpiled_books @EconTalker @tylercowen 👌🤣

@EconTalker @tylercowen I bought it following your first tweet and can confirm I am 8 pages in. I've also lost track of who's who. Will delay the ET listen till ~2026.

Now 400 pages into Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman preparing for my EconTalk and CWT with @tylercowen. About halfway through. It just gets better and better. A masterpiece. Read with us: Kindle: amzn.to/3z6PD8h Paperback: amzn.to/3z8M4OW

On your pod, you seemed less cogent than usual and at times even confused on the topic of reputation laundering. You’re still very clear re Tucker cynically abusing this. But a bit tongue-tied on this ‘historian’. He’s smaller, and perhaps a bit more unique in his oddities, but feels like you’re getting lost violating the very thing you complain about (Tucker at RNC), just bc you had some DMs w/ him. What am I missing?

To be fully informed, very important to listen to this, no matter where you are coming from.

@thedispatch @JonahDispatch @DavidAFrench @Jonah you finally get to the point at the end noting David would’ve been better w/ “lessor of two evils” case rather than a glorified case on voting / endorsing. As a long-time listener / fan, honestly curious who you *would* pick as lesser of evils if you must, Harris v Trump?

"The idea that voting is a window into someone’s soul strikes me as almost a theological heresy and a failure of empathetic imagination." | @JonahDispatch explains why he disagrees with @DavidAFrench's endorsement: thedispatch.com/newsletter/gfi…

@themattfriend Now do exactly this but for Trump v Harris! Fan of this experiment 😄

Tim Walz debates JD Vance

@noam_dworman You put more thought into that than her team in the statement. Boilerplate platitudes patched together, without reasoning thru implications. It’s where her ppl think dems equilibrium is on the issue. She’s doing what she can to swat away the issue. (That’s also not a good sign!)

I agree that "the Palestinian people [should ] realize their right to dignity, freedom, and self-determination.” But making it a condition of ending the war is to elevate Hamas's attack into a morally righteous conflict. Hamas is not fighting for dignity or self-determination; Hamas is fighting to eradicate Israel. If they want 2 states, existing peacefully side-by-side, let them say so - because, @KamalaHarris, they say the opposite. Very clearly and over and over. If you mean that Israel must destroy Hamas (because Hamas is a murderous and torturous authoritarian dictatorship), please say so. (She thinks she's being clever. This is dangerous drivel. )

@KonstantinKisin Deadwood

If I loved: The Wire Game of Thrones (until they ruined it at the end) 1883 1923 But also didn't like: The Sopranos Breaking Bad Succession Yellowstone I will love: ??? ??? ???

@noam_dworman More insightful than French/Isgur at Advisory Opinion (lead law pod). You made a solid case for Roberts protecting us from prosecuting-former-pres snowball & the ironic strength of ambiguity, even if I favor Ankush. Freudian slip at end calling Ami Ayalon former head of KGB? 😅

My interview with Politico legal guru Ankush Khardori. Partisanship or principle? Cannon's dismissal, Trump immunity, Chevron reversal decision, what motivated them, more. Contributor for New York magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Atlantic, TIME, USA Today, WIRED, Slate, The American Prospect, and the Columbia Journalism Review. One of the legal experts I most respect for fairminded takes.

@noam_dworman “Melt the hearts” / “they don’t want peace now, but we have to keep at it” takeaway from his answers is rather generous, but I think it’s a healthy view to nurture nonetheless. All thoughtful views should be on the table - part of the mosaic that can lead to a solution one day.

I have to admit, I did not come away with any better understanding of that issue. I think his view (simple but not crazy) is that all efforts must be made to melt the hearts of the Palestinians. Stop the settlements, stop the rhetoric, and, essentially, help save them from themselves. Make it easy for a reasonable and courageous leader to emerge. It's a psychological "peace and love" theme. It's not crazy because his pessimistic analysis of the future is trenchant, as is probably his conclusion that the violence is an endless cycle. What he's saying I guess is, yes, they don't want peace now, but we have to keep at it. But circling back, it was frustrating that he wouldn't acknowledge what seems to be the reality of those past attempts.

@Jon44444444 @noam_dworman @Jon44444444 great point I keep mulling over. It’s quite optimistic & as Haviv noted most Israelis don’t even know how/why Ra’am came to be what it is and ended up in a coalition. @noam I bet you’d understandably have been pessimistic before Sadat too. History makes sharp turns.

@noam_dworman @mosessutton89 One of the most hopeful things I've heard in a while came from Haviv during your recent interview, when he held up Ra'am as a positive example of how Islamist ideology could reform itself. I'd love to see Bennet return to power and give the coalition with Ra'am another try.

Three clips from today's interview with former Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon. 1. Does Israel fight morally? Entire interview: youtu.be/PCGRRkJTx_c We go into the peace process, problems with Netanyahu, and more.

@havivrettiggur @ComicDaveSmith 🐐

Hi @ComicDaveSmith. This is long. I'm sorry for that. It's a real answer, not some quote-mining or Twitter-y retort. I think you're honestly challenging my point. So I'm honestly responding. Yes, Netanyahu brags that he alone prevented a Palestinian state - just as he once bragged he’d be the one to establish a Palestinian state. He also brags that his "propping up of Hamas" was a clever rightist ploy to prevent Palestinian unity. But he several times ran election campaigns on the explicit promise that he’d *topple* Hamas in Gaza. So which Netanyahu should we believe? The answer, alas, is neither. He has no specific policy. It’s political maneuvers all the way down. But here's what we can know. The policy of containing and stabilizing Hamas in Gaza is older than Netanyahu. It began with Olmert. And it was pieced together over the years as much by leftists as by rightists. Ironically, the same Ehud Barak you quoted here was Israel’s defense minister from 2009 to 2013, and was instrumental in putting this policy in place and developing the strategic thinking behind it. Before Barak thought Netanyahu was “propping up Hamas” to prevent a two-state peace, Barak was “containing Hamas” in the hope of enabling a *return* to a two-state peace. The policy itself was identical. Barak is today arguing that Netanyahu may be pursuing the same policy, but with opposite intentions. That may be, but it's the same policy nonetheless. And alas, Barak is probably the only Israeli politician who’s less trusted by the public than the wily Netanyahu, because he’s exactly the same kind of dissembling chameleon. And that’s the point. To understand Israel's containment policy, you can't start at the end, as though Israeli leaders have some unique gift to shape reality precisely to their liking and always intended this very outcome. To actually understand it, you have to put yourself in the Israeli government’s shoes back then. If you’re the Israeli government in 2009 or 2014 or 2019, what options are available to you in Gaza? Hamas is massively invested in building tunnels to make any future Israeli attack impossibly costly for Israel by forcing the IDF to go through the civilian population if it ever tries to get to Hamas. So war on any serious scale - the kind demanded by Netanyahu's far-right allies over the years - is off the table. Hamas isn't appeasable, can't moderate and has no interest in any political process. That's a consensus view among Israelis for a simple reason: Its long history of terrorist assaults on civilians *specifically* *to* *stop* *peace* *efforts*. It bombed Jerusalem buses just before the 1996 election and successfully tilted the election away from the left by the narrowest margin in Israeli electoral history, all but freezing Oslo for three years. It drove the Second Intifada’s wave of 140 suicide bombings that crashed the Camp David process and shattered the Israeli left for a generation. No serious Israeli thinks Hamas’s terrorism is about occupation. That's true even among Israelis who desperately want to end the occupation, and those who saw the first-intifada stone-throwing protestors as protesting occupation. Hamas, they understand, is different. The suicide bombings of Hamas were never about ending occupation, they were about the danger, as Hamas perceived it for two generations, that the peace process might succeed. So what are your options as a government? War in Gaza with devastating civilian costs and untenable costs for Israel? Lifting the blockade and giving Hamas free access to ally regimes’ flow of funding and resources? Or, as they finally decided, left-wing leaders and right-wing ones alike across 17 years of Israeli governments, would you pursue a containment policy that attempts to allow a Gazan economy to exist while minimizing Hamas’s capacity to prepare for never-ending war? Or put another way, would you have prevented the Qatari money from entering? Would you have risked Gaza’s economy crashing, a humanitarian crisis, and the high probability that a collapsing Hamas regime, in its desperation, might trigger a great war? No, Dave, Netanyahu’s attempt to paint his relatively moderate past as a sneaky, 13-year far-right plot is not the reality. It's a pretense meant to serve his present-day political troubles. That’s how nearly every Israeli, including in Likud, explains it. Smotrich, for what it’s worth, was being completely honest. He believes every word in that quote. One final comment: Be wary of quote-mining. You got these quotes from activists who spend their time sifting through texts to find what they need, often decontextualized and never the full picture. If I did that to Palestinian leaders, I could prove to you that they're pretty much all Nazis. Literally. No, they’re not Nazis. Nazism doesn’t explain their predicament, their opinions, their responses to the problems they face. But plenty of central Palestinian leaders and ideologues, particularly in Hamas but also in Fatah, have flirted with Nazi ideas over the years. The paper trail is long enough to convince a great many Israelis that there's a deep connection. It's still a misreading of Palestinian strategy and thinking. Quote-mining isn’t a path to understanding. It’s a path to bias confirmation. Sorry again for the length. I have more to say. Barak's actual critique of Netanyahu is more sophisticated and serious than the quote you brought. But that's for another time.