I've spent much of the morning

 

listening to a left-wing political philosopher named Vivek Chibber.

He's got me thinking in broad ideological terms about the nature of the current Left and about my own position within the broader spectrum.

So my first question this morning is, if Marxist Hegelianism gives us the tension between capitalism and socialism allegedly resulting in communism, why instead cannot the desired resulting synthesis be regulatory capitalism, aka "social democracy"?

Marx believed in Hegel's notion of thesis > antithesis > synthesis as applied to the material world of capitalism.

For Marx the thesis was capitalism, the antithesis was socialism, and the synthesis was communism.

I find a more sensible synthesis between right-wing neo-liberal capitalism and uptight authoritarian socialism would be regulatory capitalism of the type that we have throughout the West today with necessary modifications according to national conditions and culture.

We do not need revolution in the West, but a rational and compassionate balance between free market capitalism and its regulation in order to promote the general well-being.

It is this tension which stands at the very center of our politics.

What I often tell people is that the central political tensions in the West today are neatly expressed in the Preamble to the Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The primary tension between the Left and Right is the tension between the government's obligation to promote the general welfare in constant tension with the blessings of liberty.

The Left leans toward the former, while the Right leans toward the latter, but both are necessary to a well-functioning society.

We need capitalism, not socialism, because it promotes an expanding economy and creative entrepeneurship, but it must be regulated so that regular people also benefit from that expanding economy, have universal access to health care, worker safety, and a curb on the capitalist tendency toward unjust exploitation.

Chibber reminds us that socialists claim their political ideology comes directly from the seventeenth-century Enlightenment because it applies Enlightenment Rationalism to the social world of politics and human relations.

Certainly traditional liberalism is a manifestation of the Enlightenment as it gave us capitalism, democracy, freedom of speech and, thus, the US Constitution, itself.

The difference is that at the core of the Enlightenment is the belief in the autonomy of the individual, while the core of socialism is not the individual, but the collective good.

In the contemporary West, most conservatives acknowledge the need to promote the general welfare and most leftists acknowledge the need for individual liberty, which is part of the reason that they support a woman's right to choose an abortion.

Right and Left on the contemporary scene are not nearly so mutually exclusive as we like to think.

Further, too much emphasis on individual liberty allows individual authoritarians to run amuck, while too much emphasis on the collective well-being ultimately deterioriates into state authoritarianism.

A contemporary antizionist

 

is someone willing to fight for social justice until the last Jew.

The Most Important Question

anyone who cares about politics and the well-being of their people must ask is, "What is the best argument on the other side?"

If you honestly care about what is happening around you then you should want to speak the truth and the only way that you can possibly do that is to fairly consider relevant counter-arguments... however much you may despise the Woke Idiots or Right-Wing MAGA Fascists on the other side.

The problem is that the vast majority of us, including me, tend to be terrible at this. The reason for that is because it is psychologically discomforting to think of oneself as wrong and, worse yet, demonstrably shown to be wrong by The Enemy... on the otherside.

The Dark Side.

The Bad People.

I am right and they are wrong!

I am Good and Smart and Caring.

They are not.

{You get me.}

So, the question that I am beginning to ponder is, what are the best arguments coming out of the Democrats concerning how Trump sucks?

I was talking to my better half, who is a liberal Democrat, and she was arguing that The Big, Beautiful Bill cut Medicare and Medicaid to some citizens who are legally entitled to it and that it is going to increase the national debt by 3 or 4 or 5 trillion dollars.

I don't know the truth, yet.

But we shall see.

--

Part of the reason that I liked being on political social media is because it is the best way to keep one's ear to the pavement.

By doing so you learn how the issues that concern you are framed.

One thing that needs to be realized by the pro-Jewish / pro-Israel / pro-liberalism camp is that the fight is not between some evil white-Zionist-racist-colonial whateverthefuck of the progressive neo-socialist imagination against the innocent, bunny-like "Palestinians."

This contemporary, leftist, academic way of looking at the conflict conjures the Jewish state as the latest and most miserable form of despised Western Colonialism that must be eradicated in order to create decent lives for the oppressed.

The problem is that this is ideological fantasy.

What is true is that Zionism is the most successful anti-colonial movement in world history.

What is also true is that the rise of political Islam, despite 9/11, is largely ignored by the West -- left, right, and center.

The Islamic Republic in Iran is (or was) the foremost example of the Jihad in the world today. As such it represents one of the greatest opponents of not only the Jewish people, but of liberalism.

Thankfully, there is a liberal movement within Iran that seeks to overthrow the Ayatollahs and the imposition of Islamic religious authoritarianism on that country.

The bottom line is that if you stand with the Palestinian-Jihadis against the tiny Jewish minority in the Middle East then you are standing against the liberal resistance in Iran.

Ultimately, by standing with the Jihadi, you are standing with those who throw Gay people from tall buildings, keep women quite literally under wraps, and who seek the genocide of the Jews as a religious obligation.

Any western liberal who wishes to actually stand with liberalism as a political orientation -- and thus stand with the regular people of Iran -- must stand against the Jihadis and that includes the poor, crazed, pathetic Jihadis in Gaza.

And if you honestly care about the well-being of Gazan children you should be demanding the surrender of Hamas and the release of the hostages because only that can save lives.

The Cover-Up

 

I was just listening to a conversation between Ezra Klein and Jake Tapper concerning the so-called "cover-up" of Joe Biden's cognitive abilities.

The implication of the conversation is that it was not a cover-up. A "cover-up" is a conspiracy and a conspiracy requires a number of people who understand that they are doing something underhanded and they intend to keep their participation secret.

What Tapper was talking about was "group think."

So, it was not that members of Biden's inner circle came together with the intention of deceiving the public, but that they came to believe what they were telling one another in the face of obvious truths to the contrary.

There was nothing nefarious about it and it was not due to personal stupidity. The truth is -- and I see this increasingly as the years go by -- that people believe what they want to believe. And generally what they want to believe is not just what is good for them personally, but what their families and friends believe.

It is a social imperative.

I think it is reasonable to say that what most people believe around politics has less to do with a thoughtful consideration of the issues over time, then it has to do with the tendency toward social conformity and deference to authority.

When it came to Biden's cognitive abilities they, most of them, probably believed that, yeah, he wasn't the Biden of ten years ago, but he's OK.

Everybody else around them thought he was OK and, for the most part, he was OK. Of course, then there were the times when it wasn't... but basically he was.

Or so they thought.

It wasn't so much that they were lying to us as they were lying to themselves.

Just like the rest of us do about any number of issues every damn day.

The Zohran Mamdani

victory for the NYC Democratic Party mayoral candidacy is the most significant challenge yet by the antizionist neo-socialist wing of the Democratic Party to the decrepit Schumer-Pelosi establishment.

I find all this Mamdani Hoo-Ha fascinating.

There is talk concerning the extent to which his antizionism will affect his candidacy and relationship with his voter base. This is obviously most concerning around the fairly sizeable Jewish population which is highly pro-Israel.

His supporters insist that he is not antisemitic and, in fact, just recently he reaffirmed his commitment to the safety of New York’s Jews. 

Speaking strictly for myself, I’d rather throw myself off a cliff than support an antizionist.

The guy spoke in favor of “globalize the intifada,” for fuck’s sake.

The intifadas in Israel, particularly the Second Intifada, meant open season on Jews by Palestinian-Jihadis who killed over a thousand of our brothers and sisters there.

The call for an intifada is a call to blow up busses and set-off suicide belts in pizzerias.

If “intifada” means kill the Jews, “globalize the intifada” means kill the Jews wherever we may be found, including New York.

Frankly, a New York Jew would have to be a stone-cold idiot to support this guy... yet we know that many did. About 20 percent, apparently.

"Do They Pay You..."

 

Reddit - r/headlinepics

TrueHaiku:

Do they fucking pay you to come in here and defend genocide? I mean, the world sees what is happening. We have livestreams and videos now. The world generally sees Israel for what it is. No amount of Israeli cockslurping is gonna change our minds, so what's your goal?

.

Good_Low2461 (me):

It's important for Jewish people to see how the hatred evolves in real time.

See, we didn't have that opportunity in the 1930s because the media wasn't nearly as evolved as it is now.

--

hellomondays:

It is antisemitic to say that Jews (not just Israel, apparently) are incapable of upholding human rights in wartime.

.

Good_Low2461

"Human rights"?

My guess is that Israel is doing a better job upholding human rights in wartime than probably any other country in human history.

If you look into it you will find that the civilian-to-combatant death ratio in Gaza is far lower than was the US civilian-to-combatant death ratio in Iraq War II.

One of the main problems that Israel (and the Jews, in general) has is not the never-ending attempt by the Palestinian-Jihadis to murder the Jews in Israel, but the anti-Israel / anti-Jewish propaganda campaign that seeks to spread hatred.

We see this throughout social media constantly.

Israel is portrayed as demonic.

And, really, that was the entire point of Oct 7.

Surely you have asked yourself what Hamas hoped to achieve on that day.

Well, what they wanted was plenty of dead Palestinian-Arabs so that their progressive friends in the Red-Green Alliance could scream from the hillsides how "Zionists" are evil.

And, I tell ya, it worked very well.

--

EyeGod (his response to my claim that Jews are from Judea).

Nope, not all of them.

But, hey, you go back far enough, we’re all from Africa, right?

So, how far do you wanna push your logic?

.

Good_Low2461

That's a fair point.

Antisemitic antizionists basically engage in two styles of attack on the Jewish people and Israel.

The first is in portraying Israel and its supporters as evil.

You know, in the Middle Ages they accused us of killing Jesus because that was the most evil thing that you could ascribe to someone at the time and it justified their killing of Jews.

Now they scream from the hillsides about "genocide" because, today, that is the most evil thing that you could ascribe to someone and it justifies the killing of Jews.

The second is in what I call "The Indigeneity Question."

In this case, the enemies of the Jewish people will say, "You stole the land from the indigenous Palestinians!"

Well, the fact is that the Jewish people, including those of us from European diaspora, have genetic roots that go to the Levant.

So do most Palestinian-Arabs, of course.

But questions of indigeneity are not primarily about genetics, but about culture.

The Palestinian-Arabs are still Arabs.

Their culture is primarily derived from the Arab side of their family.

Their language is Arabic and Islam was born on the Arabian Peninsula.

Likewise, the Jews are indigenous to the Land of Israel.

The Hebrew language comes from there, as does our religion.