uboat53

Fundamentally, to me, this represents a declaration of values rather than a specific set of policies. When I say I am a liberal, what I mean is that I believe that our society needs to be changed to make it better for everyone. I compare this to conservatives, who believe that society as it is, or at least significant parts of it, need to be preserved, revolutionaries, who believe that society needs to be drastically overthrown in order to make a new society that is better for everyone, and reactionaries, who believe that society needs to be drastically overthrown and returned to some, often imagined, perfect state.

So what do I mean by "society"? And, just as importantly, what do I mean by "better"?

Let's start with society. To me, society is a combination of institutions and individuals. Institutions are also combinations of individuals, but a more limited group of individuals than society as a whole. Institutions are things like governments, corporations, unions, and religious institutions; basically anything where groups of individuals organize to achieve common goals. Even things like fan clubs and neighborhood watches are institutions that are part of society in my framework.

When understanding that definition of society, I think you can see that laws are necessary in some cases, but so is engagement and education. You can't legislate what's in someone's head and, over time, the collective actions of discriminatory people in positions of power can have a huge effect, even if no one does anything that could reasonably be constrained by law.

With that in mind, what do I mean by "better"? To me, the ultimate goal of any civilized society is that every person's needs to be met and every person's potential be able to be fulfilled. I think it's fair to say that our society has not met this standard yet, nor has any other society that I can think of, so my view is that we need to keep experimenting, researching, and making changes to get closer and closer to that goal.

As I said, though, unlike a revolutionary or a reactionary, I don't believe that "better" includes the overthrow of our existing society. As imperfect as it is, our current society is better in just about every measure of well-being that you could attempt to measure than any other society in history. In education, health-care, purchasing power, life expectancy, general welfare, and dozens of other metrics, our society is better now than any other place or period you could wish to measure. This is especially true if you expand your view to the global scale.

Overthrowing this system would undo its serious accomplishments and advantages with no guarantee that the system replacing it would be better. At least, none that we've seen so far.

I also want to point out, since this seems to be an issue of late, that when I say that my liberalism means I want to make society better for everyone, I genuinely mean EVERYONE. I'm not in the "eat the rich" or "kill the cops" camp, I believe that my better society will be a better society for them too. Perhaps not in the way they would like to make it themselves or even what they would expect, but I genuinely believe that absolutely everyone will be better off in a society where privation and poverty are things of the past and each person is able to achieve their own best.

All of my policy preferences flow from that understanding. I'm a data guy, a scientist and an engineer, so my policy preferences generally go in the direction of policies that have shown that they are likely to improve the lives of people. I should point out that, in general, I tend to place a higher value on improvements in the life of those at the bottom more than I do on costs to those who are better off. This is generally because most of those costs still keep those who are better off at quite a comfortable level while the impact to those at the bottom can be genuinely life-altering. That said, this has limits, and I wouldn't support policies that impose large costs on those who are better off for only meager improvements for those at the bottom.

As for why I'm writing this up, I think it's important to be clear on what we believe in a specific sense from time to time rather than relying on labels to do that work for us all of the time. Just calling myself a liberal can sometimes lump me in with some people that I do not agree with who may also call themselves liberal. I hope you found this interesting and also informative.

Honestly, I think there's a bit of a cognitive dissonance that's been with the Zionist project since it first went mainstream in the aftermath of the Second World War.

You see, before that, Zionism wasn't really the mainstream of Jewish thought. After the Holocaust, however, it became mainstream among traumatized European (and other) Jews who flooded to the region. However, those Jews brought many of their post-Enlightenment, liberal values with them and, in a sort of compromise, the Zionist movement adopted many of those ideas into the State of Israel like Democracy and Liberal governance.

The problem is that Jewish rule was always going to be incompatible with those. Even after decades of conflict, about half of the population governed by the modern State of Israel is not Jewish and those numbers just get worse if you take the territories (like the East Bank, the Sinai, and Southern Lebanon) that hard-core Zionists want to add to Israel. If Israel were a true democracy, in that all the people governed by it had an equal voice in its governance, it would immediately cease to be Jewish.

Fundamentally, there is no way to square Zionism with liberal, democratic ideals. The only way for Israel to be both democratic and Jewish would be to either expel a huge proportion of the non-Jewish population or to kill them, both either war crimes or crimes against humanity.

Ultimately, though, Zionists are waging a war of ideas primarily in liberal, democratic societies. Let's face it, most debate over Zionism is happening in Europe and North America, most of the rest of the world is already against them. In order to not immediately lose a debate under such conditions, there has to at least be a pretense of adherence to liberal, democratic values.

And that's where the dissonance comes in. I think most Zionists in the US, at least, believe in liberal, democratic ideas and will point to the liberal, democratic ideas put forth in Israel's founding documents, but will either ignore of minimize the actions of the State of Israel that run counter to those ideas. It's a balancing act that has worked for a long time as Israel has limited its more ethnonationalist tendencies and is starting to come apart now that those tendencies are more unrestrained.

Now, let's be honest, any large organization is, at best, a kludge of compromises between the various factions within it that end up in some type of reasonably stable equilibrium, Israel is no different than any other nation in that regard. What is different right now is that the actions of one faction which has seized control of the official body are beginning to diverge from that kludge of compromises in ways that threaten the stability of the current equilibrium. The dissonance you see is an attempt to maintain the equilibrium, damaged though it is.

At the end of the day, my personal opinion is increasingly that the project of Zionism was never going to be able to co-exist with liberal, democratic values as long as the region claimed had a significant non-Jewish population. Ethnonationalism isn't actually a solid basis for individual liberties and human rights and it's really only the chaos and trauma of the post-Holocaust period that allowed that circle to be squared even temporarily.

This appointment should tell you everything you need to know about why the Trump Administration is so mind-bogglingly incompetent. We're in the middle of a quagmire of a war, seemingly with no way to end it, in the Middle East and East Asia is getting dicier by the second.

There would seem to be no more pressing time to have someone with deep knowledge and experience of international affairs and global intelligence in the position of Director of National Intelligence right now. At the very least, it seems that this is a position that should be filled by someone who can do the job full time, right?

Instead, Trump is appointing Bill Pulte, the heir to a housing development company who has worked in investment firms and, for about a year now, has been the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. He's not even going to be leaving the FHFA job, so he'll just be part time.

Why Bill Pulte, you may ask? Well, Bill Pulte took a job that was supposed to be fairly hum-drum, FHFA isn't usually a headline-making agency, and turned it into a machine for attacking Trump's personal enemies. In just his first few months on the job, Pulte forwarded mortgage information from New York Attorney General Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, and Congressman Eric Swalwell, all political enemies of Donald Trump, for prosecution even when evidence shows similar actions by Trump cabinet members and even his own father and stepmother.

In other words, Pulte isn't being appointed Director of National Intelligence because he has any knowledge or experience in the field of intelligence or foreign affairs, he's being appointed Director of National Intelligence because he places his loyalty to Trump ahead of the oath he swore when he took a position of public trust. In fact, it's fairly clear that the Trump Administration places such a low opinion on the value of intelligence and accurate information that they feel that this is a job that a totally unqualified partisan can do on a part-time basis.

Think about it, every single day he goes out and says something about how we're really close to an Iran deal, even when that is explicitly contradicted by evidence or all the other statements from his administration. Obviously, there are concerns that he's losing touch with reality for various reasons, but someone who's losing touch would not generally be this consistent.

There's another factor to consider, though, the TACO trade. Over the last year or so, Wall Street has gotten used to the idea that they can influence presidential policy by trading en masse, specifically by selling and dropping the market in response to really stupid moves. And not just the stock market, bonds and commodities as well. Pretty consistently, Trump has chickened out of some of his more extreme moves when this happens.

At this point, the very clear expressed desire of the markets is for the Strait of Hormuz to open again. Given the current military and political realities, that is only going to happen with a negotiated deal. If Trump gives up on making a deal quickly or if he proves incapable, markets will fall and oil prices will rise. On the other hand, pretty much the only political support that Trump has left is from Iran hawks and any deal that is within reach at the moment would be unacceptable to them.

So Trump can't make a deal because it would cost him some of his last political support and he can't admit this because the stock market, probably one of the last remaining bright spots in the economy, would likely crash and oil prices, already painful, would soar.

Daily remarks untethered from reality are the solution because, let's face it, Trump has never been one for long-term planning. We saw that in full force in his covid response; had he done a quick shut down in the spring and gotten things under control in the summer, he could have run his fall campaign on the economic bounce of reopening, but he was only capable of understanding unpopularity in the moment.

Keeping the stock market elevated beyond what economic fundamentals will support only makes the eventual correction more painful but, as long as traders are more focused on rewarding or punishing what Trump says, he can keep the scam going for one more day.