The Most Absurd Dataset I’ve Ever Seen and A Troubling Truth About Liberation

The attitudes in American on Israel and Palestine have flipped, we can't ignore the fact that violence may have "worked."There’s a deeply uncomfortable question at the center of political history: is violence ever justified—or even necessary—in the pursuit of freedom? In a widely shared debate, Steven Pinker argues that nonviolent movements are not only more moral, but more effective, citing a dataset from Harvard’s Kennedy School as empirical proof. But when you actually examine that data, the argument starts to unravel. In this essay, I take a close look at how complex resistance movements are reduced to simplistic binaries—success or failure, violent or nonviolent—and how that kind of “counting” can distort reality to produce clean, convenient conclusions... which might be very wrong.Along the way, I explore the psychology of cognitive dissonance, the narratives we build to justify violence, and the difficulty—perhaps impossibility—of measuring something like liberation. This isn’t an argument in favor of violence, but a challenge to the idea that history, morality, and revolution can be neatly captured in a spreadsheet.00:00 Intro00:47 Is Violence Ever Justified?05:18 Pacifism and Violence What is Moral and What Works?07:23 Cognitive Dissonance Explained12:04 Three Pieces of the Argument on Liberation17:03 The Harvard Database25:11 Palestine Liberation and October 7th28:30 The Oppressors Know What They Are Doing31:40 Ghassan Kanafani: Poetry and Armed ResistanceBECOME A MEMBER - MONTHLY MEMBERS ONLY LIVESTREAM https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5NIku35U9thGG9WBJjE0sw/joinFor more from Jay visit whatjaythinks.com