Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're

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Okay, well it is Saturday, November 14th, a day after Paris. And as you all know,

at least 129 people were murdered last night by jihadists, probably affiliated with ISIS.

ISIS has claimed credit for it, and many hundreds of people were injured, so the death toll

will almost certainly rise by the time you've heard this. I hope to get this podcast out

tomorrow Sunday, but anyway that's where things stand at the moment. And my Twitter feed

is just inundated with people wondering what I have to say about this event. And I have

nothing new to say. This is a situation I've been in now many times. I sit down to write

or in some other way respond to recent events, and I find that I've said this stuff a hundred

times over. You just have to change the dates and a few of the nouns in a blog post or

a lecture. And you find what you've said is totally appropriate to the moment. Now that's

depressing because it means we are making the same mistakes over and over again. And the

stakes are all just getting incrementally higher. So rather than struggle to write something

new, I'm going to read an older essay entitled Sleepwalking Toward Armageddon. And I wrote

this just a year ago on September 10th, 2014, after the murder of journalist James Foley

by Gihani John, who was killed yesterday, I believe, in a drone strike or was reported

...