Abracadabrah

I create as I speak

Announcement

I've begun joint blogging at Kesher Talk.

All that means is that a number of the posts I put up here can also be found there, limited primarily to The War on Islamism and Jewish Issues. Posts on topics outside of these – heh! there haven't been many lately – will only appear here.

Although one thing: I included an introduction at Kesher Talk that I never cross posted here. So it is about time I posted a relevant version of it here.

I consider myself to be a neo-conservative hawk. The moment when I broke definitively from liberalism came soon after I graduated from college, during the Cold War, upon completing Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler. In conjunction with the jolt of understanding that book delivered, I began to read the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. Those editorials simply seemed to describe reality better, in my opinion, than the same events looked at through the filter of the NYTimes which then, as now, preferred to accept blinders and boundaries imposed by mainstream leftist ideology.

It was a different era, though. Being newly on the right then, as a NY Jew, without access to all the multiple sources of information that the internet currently puts at our disposal, had its stresses and shortcomings. On the other hand, it also meant I paid more attention to the nuances of the assumptions that the NYTimes was making in its columns and op eds. And that I noticed how the information was being framed. And where I sharply diverged from their conclusions.

So it was this, rather than a series of events culminating in the terrorist explosions in 9/11, that accounted for my turn to the right. Up until that point, I had not been particularly political, except when it came to feminism, where I was very active. But this evolution meant I heard about neo-conservatives, for one, years before this term became the familiar butt of the left it now is. And it is among that cadre that I generally place myself as far as foreign policy.

I'm extremely happy that this administration has rid itself, as an animating principle, of that moribund old notion in real politik, whereby every dictator, no matter how corrupt, as long as he was stable, would be considered acceptable in order to maintain the all valuable status quo. While I believe that the turn from this policy is sincere, it is also true that in reality implementing the new foreign policy will run into bumps and crevasses along the road.

posted by Alcibiades @ 6:57 PM