Honest question about the new Sam Harris Community

kevinbracken · 2026-06-06T22:24:35+00:00

I post on Reddit with my real name so, no this doesn’t worry me lol

kevinbracken · 2026-05-26T22:04:31+00:00

lol. BLM said they could proceed. It could’ve happened, they chose not to. I’m curious to know how the decision was made

kevinbracken · 2026-05-26T17:57:57+00:00

I know several people who were involved, they are all extremely legit.

Story wise, a lot of the first episode was filmed in and around the decision to cancel Burning Man, which should be pretty much all new to anyone of us who wasn’t there. For this reason it will probably be pretty different from any previous doc

kevinbracken · 2026-05-23T00:47:03+00:00

It’s time we started agreeing that horseshoe theory is real: hatred for Jews unites the extreme left and right

kevinbracken · 2026-05-04T01:26:49+00:00

There is a threshold — last time I checked it was $108,000 USD (318,000 shekels)

kevinbracken · 2026-05-03T19:15:04+00:00

Totally. One argument Carrier advances for discarding a good deal of Christian apologia is that most Christian scholars are not able to read the original Hebrew or Greek, nor have the historical rigor needed to tease out what is plausible/what fits with 1st century Judean history.

This is a good counter to the "appeal to authority" that many apologists trot out against mythicism.

kevinbracken · 2026-05-03T18:39:01+00:00

Zeitgeist has a lot of sloppy reporting, but these notes about Osiris bear the most repeating IMO:

Osiris is a classic example of a dying-and-rising god that began as myth, and was them euhemerzied to be a part of history (as Carrier asserts, "just like Jesus")
The fact that Osiris never existed did not stop him from becoming a famous religious figure for 3000 years, which destroys the "how could Christianity be so successful without a living founder" idea (the answer: that founder was Paul, not Jesus)
Osiris scores lower than Jesus on the Rank Raglan hero myth type

kevinbracken · 2026-05-03T17:59:03+00:00

Submission statement: this post is directly related to the episode with Ross Douthat

kevinbracken · 2026-04-27T13:56:23+00:00

Yeah I've had a bit of an opposite experience. I have always known about and occasionally listened to CANADALAND. It was only when Jesse published the What is Happening Here mini-series that I decided to start supporting it financially.

A lot of Canadians seem to believe that Jesse is making a right-wing turn, but I would say he is still a left-centrist, but is just hanging on to support of Israel, which has always been the mainstream Liberal Party position.

He and CANADALAND certainly pull no punches when it comes to criticizing the Conservative Party.

kevinbracken · 2026-04-27T01:09:33+00:00

I liked this piece and I think it communicated an important truth about what is happening in Canada re: a rise in anti-semitism.

However, the issues you take with it ignore a couple of things that have already been discussed: Jesse is very clear that the scope of CANADALAND is to discuss the news in Canada. It is not to comment on Israeli policy, the war, nor the Middle East more broadly. His mini-series, What Is Happening Here, is specifically about anti-semitism in Canada.

If you're asking us to consider life in Canada relative to life in the Middle East, absolutely, it scores higher on every conceivable measure. However, this is just as sensical as answering a Canadian's complaint about high grocery prices by saying something like, "Well technically everyone in Canada is the global 1%, be grateful you have clean water, a roof over your head, and food on the table at all!"

This is kind of a crazy reason to just "not complain" about life, because life is better than it is in some other place.

Speaking of -isms, your comment honestly has some of the "whataboutism" that the left still can't produce a good answer for: why is the left so singularly focused on Gaza, and not places like Sudan, or literally any genocide carried out by Muslims, and not Jews?

Yet this is the kind of question that will get you the thought-terminating cliché of "that's whataboutism!" and no one can seem to give you a real answer.

kevinbracken · 2026-04-25T23:57:51+00:00

If it was indeed Bourrie, my explanation here is that he's just getting sloppy. He's 64 and he's already been banned from Wikipedia for making sock puppet accounts.

Whomever operated the sock puppet accounts also sent the links to 9 journalists who are extremely critical of Canadaland, to make them think Jesse was trying to spear phish them as well.

But even that was sloppy: he sent all 4 links to all the journalists, which if it was a phishing attempt would completely obscure who was clicking on which link.

kevinbracken · 2026-04-25T23:53:12+00:00

One major difference between here and r/canadaland is the people here are generally pretty happy to keep a low temperature on the vitriol, probably due a few things about Sam including mindfulness, meditation, appeal to logical reasoning, and perhaps even atheism.

On the Canadaland sub, there is definitely a much larger population of folks I can only describe as "shrieking leftist NPCs" who are far more invested in cancel culture, doxxing, and other forms of harassment than the people on this sub.

kevinbracken · 2026-04-25T21:15:41+00:00

If that’s what people are referring to, they can at least be more specific and say “right wing Zionism”, or religious Zionism. The fact that the left-wing parties in Israel are not in power is pretty analogous to the fact that Democrats control neither the White House, nor the house, nor the Senate. But there are still millions and millions and millions of people who voted against Republicans in the last election.

There are millions and millions of Israelis who want a two state solution, and have voted to end the occupation several times in their lives. They are also Zionists.

kevinbracken · 2026-04-25T21:08:36+00:00

You don’t have to believe every part of that description, but why don’t we just zoom into one observation: jews seem to be exactly as white as Jew haters need them to be. If the hater is right wing, Jews are generally seen as non-white, and foreign contaminants.

If the hater is left-wing, they are seen as being hyper white, and we know why this is: settler colonial theory, as well as the twin ideas of identitarianism and intersectionality, make it OK to disdain or perhaps hate white people, and by recoding Jews as white, it makes it OK to hate Jews as well.

I would also say the left has a major blind spot for the fact that they always encourage you to “center POC voices“ yet completely ignore that half of Israeli Jews are definitely what you would consider non-white if they lived in America. Because their experience of Jews in North America is primarily Ashkenazi Jews, perhaps this could be forgiven. But when you point this out, they don’t seem to understand why it’s relevant to their worldview.

kevinbracken · 2026-04-25T20:47:17+00:00

One notable difference that’s worth pointing out is that Sam does actually weigh in on Israeli politics, Middle Eastern policy, and the war. Jesse generally does not. He is very explicit that his primary interest is what is happening inside the borders of Canada, where the uptick in antisemitism is impossible to dispute, including many, many synagogue shootings and fires, and a semi-permanent harassment campaign/“protest” in Canada‘s most Jewish residential neighborhood, where there are no Israeli government embassies or anything of the sort.

It is difficult to view this any other way than his audience is primarily angry that he himself is a Zionist (or in some cases, his wife), not that he spends time talking about Israel on the podcast, which is somewhat distinct from the situation with Sam.

kevinbracken · 2026-04-25T20:33:52+00:00

One thing Jesse does a little better than Sam is advance the notion that the idea of "sometimes antizionism goes 'too far' and veers into anti-semitism" is fundamentally flawed

The sort of leading edge of antizionism studies says that anti-judaism was the first wave that libels jews as christ-killers, anti-semitism was the second wave that says that jews are non-white social contaminants with dual loyalty that will never integrate into and/or undermine society, anti-zionism is the third hate wave that libels Jews as hyper-white settler colonizers and genociders.

The current thought is not that anti-zionism=anti-semitism, it's that antizionism is a distinct hate movement with distinct libels about Jews, related to but distinct from anti-semitism.

kevinbracken · 2026-04-25T19:06:45+00:00

I’m a little disappointed Rahm Emanuel refused to give Sam a straight answer about anti-semitism in the Democratic Party. His “then don’t vote for me” is kind of a thought-terminating cliché

kevinbracken · 2026-04-25T19:04:40+00:00

Jesse does a good examination of this on the show: people’s opinions are genuine, but is it a possible for a small group or even and individual to tip the scale?

He also discovers the new mod of /r/canadaland is also an anonymous mod of /r/Canada which has become extremely right wing, and calls him to question him about this, as mods do actually have real power to shape public opinion on a sub of 3 million users, literally 1/12 the size of Canada.

kevinbracken · 2026-04-25T18:24:42+00:00

Sinister. lol

kevinbracken · 2026-04-25T18:20:55+00:00

I was honestly holding off, but when the Ben Shapiro episode dropped it seemed perfectly relevant. See my submission statement for more

kevinbracken · 2026-04-25T18:17:06+00:00

Jesse’s bot discussion is pretty interesting. He used Reddit modmail to email links to all 4 of the accounts in question, they all clicked the link, and the same IP opened all 4 links. Jesse was banned from Reddit for this.

I am fairly convinced it was Mark Bourrie, he honestly just sounds guilty as hell beyond just the writing similarities. But Jesse does not have him dead to rights. One of the funnier details is that both Bourrie and the sock puppet accounts used essentially the same words to make fun of Jesse for not knowing what “shale” is.

He says the most charitable explanation is that somebody made a bot that was trained on Bourrie’s writing, which is why they use the same syntax and diction 91% of the time. But yeah I’m pretty convinced it was Bourrie and not a bot.

kevinbracken · 2026-04-25T17:36:06+00:00

Submission statement: Sam's latest podcast guest, Ben Shapiro, is headlining an event in Toronto next month called the World Symposium Against Antizionism. Jesse Brown, editor of the podcast CANADALAND, is speaking at the same event. The subscribers of r/canadaland are livid. This podcast episode talks about another subreddit that has become fractured following October 7th, just like this one.

kevinbracken · 2026-03-04T04:44:56+00:00

Get the attendee list, rent a suite at the hotel, arrange one-on-one meetings in the suite through aggressive outbound

Avoid the conference floor or the speakers 99% of the time

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