Hi, everyone. Welcome to Michael and us. Luke here with something that we haven't done before,

but which I think is warranted in light of recent events. This will be a feature-length interview

episode related to the evolving situation in Palestine and Israel. We obviously haven't done

anything quite like this before, but given everything that's been going on, this did feel

like an occasion for a straightforwardly, politically concerned episode rather than something

where we just riff on a movie, though rest assured there's plenty more of that to come.

So we'll turn to my interview soon, but since this is officially an episode and I currently have the floor,

I did just want to add a few words to what I said on last week's episode. I feel, as I'm sure

many of you do, continue to feel a profound sense of moral outrage and also shame about what's

currently going on in the world. I completely understand and share the

horror elicited by the attacks of October the 7th, but I am just incredibly perplexed at the moral

calculus that has been taken up by our governments and by elite pundits since throughout North

America and Europe, including my own, a moral calculus that is blissfully serene,

it seems, at the idea of cutting off food and water

to more than two million stateless refugees,

nearly half of them children under the age of 18,

and subjecting one of the most densely populated regions

of the world to bogus evacuation orders, all of it amid ceaseless

aerial bombardment. Then again, the rules-based international order, quote-unquote, that we've heard

so much about, has been just as serene about the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza throughout the

past 16 years, a period in which they have been in a very real way

cut off from the outside world, surrounded by fences with mounted, remote-controlled machine

...