Explore the Dilemma archive:
Latest Essays from Jay Shapiro:
The story of Miko Peled’s journey from the son of a Zionist general to a Palestinian Cause Activist.
A conversation with Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy where we take the pulse of Israel and discuss how he came to question the Zionist project and where we might go from here.
A personal essay on Judaism, Israel, NeverAgainIsm, and Palestine. Written during the siege of Gaza in response to the October 7th attacks.
The morality of intentions and self-deceptions in the Israel Palestinian conflict. A look at the moral distinction between collateral damage, intentional civilian targeting, and something much more common and psychologically complex which the Jewish experience makes Israel particularly suspectable to.
A look at a lot of bodycam footage of police shootings that reveal what no spreadsheet could… and several thoughts about the awful impossible situation.
An essay from the author of The Essential Sam Harris.
An effort to emphasize and expose a subsequent confusion that can result from noticing the non existence of Free Will.
The convergence of replaceability without risking safety and social roles of high status is happening everywhere around us and it is unleashing an obsession with low-stakes representation lever grabbing to address past injustices. But it is also arming a trigger happy public just waiting to yank you from your seat if you so much as whisper the wrong sentence.
I want to be careful with the primary analogy of this essay to not cast Wokeness as “just a bunch of 6 year olds throwing temper tantrums”. The injustices they are reacting to are obviously much more real and complex than Anthony’s weird aversion to air conditioning and barking dogs. Thus far, I have been focused on the powerful dynamic of Cancel Culture and the resulting pseudo-hostage situation in Peaksville that mirrors our current politics.
None of us are immune to what I am about to speculate about other people. And none of us are clean. The failures of the figures in ashes of the IDW are important because they are relatable.
If we want the effort to be about truth-seeking, the truths of our weaknesses and psychological blind spots are probably the most important truths to examine collectively.
“If it looks like news and it’s all over the news, it’s probably legit.”
This is an instinctual shortcut in an open society that we’ve all been using to navigate the media landscape for hundreds of years. It has served us fairly well. But those days are done.
Welcome to The Counterfeit Times.
The only difference is that one burger came from a living cow while the other was constructed from plant matter.
What is the best argument for eating the cow burger over the alternative?
If there is sadness in beautiful things let us not fool ourselves into thinking otherwise. It is only the heavy burden of time running out in just how beautiful this life outside the garden could be if we are brave enough.
Through technological advancement, we have transcended the evolved invisibility of an asymptomatic host and concurrently exposed the moral responsibility which accompanies it.
All men are created equal.
All men are not created with equal qualities, abilities, desires, opportunities, impulses, biases, environments, and instincts.
The concern is that the same system which helped us get to this asking point may now actually distract us from answering it.
I, like nearly everyone, can forecast how the Trump impeachment story will unfold in terms of votes and party lines. But what is harder to predict is what moment may come to define this entire thing.
An essay on the lure of utilitarianism and my experience with the National High School Ethics bow.
We don’t have a law in place to protect women. We need one. But first we need to be honest about what the abortion argument actually is.