sam harris has announced that he won’t debate critics of israel. i’m not really bothered by this, since debating sam harris would be beneath me anyway, but his reasoning is interesting, insofar as he doesn’t really provide any. he just repeats a bunch of demonstrably false clichés about what would happen if each side laid down their arms and so on. the closest he comes is to suggest that the moral difference between israel and the palestinians is so vast that anyone arguing for the other side can only be totally deranged, which means they’re not worth talking to. this is very weaselly, obviously, but maybe there’s an important division not between pro-israel and pro-palestine positions, but between people who think the moral gap between the two sides is unfathomably vast—ie, the deluded—and people who recognise that it’s ultimately not that big. i think israel is definitely worse, but how much worse is it than its enemies? one and a half times? a hundred times? as far as i’m concerned once you start knowingly gunning down innocent people for sport or revenge you have entered the abyss, and while some people might be deeper into the abyss than others it’s usually too lightless down there to tell. all you can say is that the distance between being in the abyss and not being in the abyss is very, very large.