text: That is your intellectually rigorous response?
  
  Nassim Taleb is one of the most respected intellectuals on the planet.
  
  How is his comment "Pro-Assad"?
  "Assad father’s operatives blew up my house in Amioun when my grandfather, then MP, voted for Bashir. In Skin in the Game I discuss this as “acting against one’s interest” (the opposite of conflict of interest). So as a scientist and a humanist, I have been setting my grudge aside in considering the far, far, far, greater cancer of Salafism or Islamofascism."