Posts I Still Want to Write:

1. A New Liberalism, Not Centrism:

In state after state, liberal beginnings curdle into mushy moderate governance, which only resulted in the railroading by the right, which in turn causes liberals to jump into alliances with the left. The right railroads moderates, the left railroads liberals, and society's breakdown is assured.

The stability and prosperity of society is not achieved by keeping to a mushy middle point between ideologies, it's by, yet again, evolving liberalism, taking the best of left and right, combining them, and rejecting what is toxic:

A broad social safety net from the left, a vigilant national defense from the right. Multilateral cooperative diplomacy from the left, reprecussions for foreign countries who behave destructively from the right. Promulgation of an agenda for human rights from the left, tolerance of alliances with dictators from the right. Massive amounts of foreign aid from the left, putative action against those who misuse aid from the right. Toughness on crime from the right, toughness on crime's causes from the left. Belief from the right in the importance of family, community, tradition, and the institutions that have always fostered them like religion, belief from the left in the importance of inclusion, chosen family, and heavy pressure to revise those traditions of religion that have no place in civil or civilized society. Fostering from the right the growth of corporations, fostering from the left the growth of government so that corporations are not too powerful to control. From the left, belief in abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, and the inviolate the rights of minorities, but also beliefs from the right in incentivising two-parent family structures (AT LEAST two parents...), and, I can't believe this is a more a right-wing point than left now, FREE SPEECH. VASTLY increased income and corporate taxes from the left, vastly increased vigilance in paying off debts from the right. Encouraging mass immigration from the left, continual mass background checks and security tactics from the right that today's leftists would find to be harassment.

To achieve all this and more is absolutely impossible in the current social state of the US or any other state, but something like this will be what's required to survive into the twenty-second century as democracies. God knows what it will be to take us there, but I believe something not unlike this is what will come when we realize there's no other choice.

Somehow this all is related to Israel....

2. The Jewish Shakespeare, The Arab Shakespeare

It's unlikely to happen, but if someone called Naguib Mahfouz and Isaac Bashevis Singer the two greatest writers of the 20th century, I'd raise no objection. It is difficult for outsiders to understand just how much both of them mean to their cultures, hell, it's difficult for insiders too. How have these two geniuses fostered so much love and so much hate? How have both of them presented dozens of characters their peoples still recognize? How do both of them so effectively challenge their peoples to constantly reexamine what it means to be both Jewish and Arab?

Both of them are said to lose half their meaning outside of their languages, just as the greatest are said to in every major language: Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dante, Pushkin, Goethe, etc. and yet they both speak in English so forcefully that how much more meaningfully must they read in their own tongues?

By reading them, we get more morally serious by having fun. There are only two words for this process: great art, and there are no artists in the world better than Mahfouz and Singer.

3. A series of posts expanding that post: "How Do You Explain?"

A. I need to explain better what I meant when I said 'persecution of Jews matters more.' It's a very controversial point, that's why I lead with it. I don't mean that it matters more in an absolute sense or that Jews are racially superior, I mean whatever the threat to individuals within certain groups or even nationalities within those groups, Judaism and Jews are more threatened than Muslims or Christians. I don't know how anyone could claim otherwise.

B. I need to explain how America's funding of Israel is not just a bribe to not become a rogue state, but is morally justifiable on its own terms; and that, perversely, if other countries put their loans to use as good as Israel does with their loans, there would be no question that Israel is deserving of it.

C. Try to get people to understand that the military industrial complex is a much more complicated phenomenon than people think, in both its benefits and dangers. It's too big a subject to elaborate on here, assuming I even have the competence....

D. Pre-emptive war. Does it save Jews? Does it save other nations? Does it save any nation? Would it? Will it? In what circumstances should it be used? In what circumstances is it dangerous? Are the results of pre-emptive war at all predictable?

E. How do you talk to radical zealots who hate everything you believe in, every choice you make, every priority you have, half your friends, half your family members, half of everything you are, and insist on you knowing it every time you see them? Can you even talk to them when they spend every interaction clearly trying to bait you and then take even the slightest irritation as a personal slight? Is it inevitable that eventually you will take the bait again without even realizing it until it's too late?

For better or worse, democracy and peace depend on exactly these interactions - both of them. If you seal yourself into a corner with people you agree with, it's not a democracy and it's a recipe for war. So we all have to find a way to have these conversations with people who wish ill everything we are, and have to have all the same carrots and sticks in our arsenal as any accomplished diplomat.

Hopefully I'll figure out what three thousand years of writers haven't...

4. The failures of educational institutions: this includes television, internet rabbitholes, and podcast propaganda on the right in addition to university, social media and podcast propaganda on the left. The current state of intellectual discourse has caused a hundred million minds over three separate generations to go to seed, and until the whole apparatus of infotainment is thrown out, we are never going to get your minds back.

Also, ---- you. :)

5. Right wingers and left wingers are enemies to Jewish survival. Full stop. This includes the Jewish ones. Do I even write an essay about it?

Also, ---- you. :)

6. Liberal Realism: Abolishing Liberal Illusions

I watched a podcast video (irony) with Walter Russell Meade, a 'radical centrist' thinker who makes great points but rarely seems to connect the dots. He made a point that's impossible to refute: in era after era, liberals attached themselves to the illusion that the formula for progress has finally been solved, and the institutions in place will solve every new challenge. It was the illusion liberals had at the end of the Cold War when regulated capitalism seemed to cause the 'end of history' (moderates and sane conservatives too). It was same illusion liberals (and leftists) had at the end of World War Two as well: that the UN would solve our problems.

The problem was never that the solutions didn't work, the problems was that the solutions worked well enough that they caused different problems.

The Cold War was not a result of failure but of success. In the late 40s and 50s, it was heightened diplomacy, prosperity and disposable income which created the Cold War even as it prevented a Third World War. Instead of the chaos of nations fighting without a deliberative body, two superpowers with diametrically opposed conceptions of prosperity faced against each other in an existential competition for who could bring the most prosperity to the most number of people. In the process, they used an infantry's worth of measures: hard, soft, sharp, diplomatic, military, intelligence, covert, and all done through the body of the UN. The United Nations was both the cause of and the solution to the Cold War, and the fact that this war was cold rather than hot was progress, and even if it was hot in many places around the world, the fact that we haven't had a nuclear war yet whose death toll is in the billions is the ultimate indicator of some human progress. We have the UN to thank for that.

Now turn that formulation on its head: it was military might that ended the Cold War, which created an unprecedented amount of disposable income in the 90s. The disposable income created what what we call the Information Revolution. If the Cold War ended hotly with bombed out continents, the world would have been too focused on rebuilding to focus on computers. The Information Revolution gave us exponentially more information, but no real way to interpret it, and since the world is focused on computers, the world is divided on how to interpret all that information, and has therefore lost its ability to interact with itself diplomatically. So instead of computers creating a better world, the world will soon be as unstable as it was at the height of the Cold War, and we have the internet and the Information Revolution to blame for it.

Once you solve the world's problems, the real work begins.

Also, ---- you. :)

Oh god there are so many more.... Let's leave it here.

Also, ---- you. :)