Curt Schilling makes bid for Jewish vote

That did not stop Trump from getting nominated. Or Bush Jr. for that matter. So not holding a lot of faith that any future candidates would be affected by similar foibles.

In America, there's only one kind of justice: legal justice, and it's supposed to apply evenly to everyone from all walks of life.

"Social justice" is a synonym for mob rule. Damned right it's an insult.

and not for the other five million American Jews...

The Israelis are the good guys in the same way we are the good guys. Small-d democratic, deeply seated Western-oriented culture, mostly codified and enforced laws protecting personal and economic freedoms. Our interests and theirs ought to land on the same side most of the time because of those cultural commonalities and ideological ties.

I'm for a two-state solution and I'm against the Likud and all of the right-wing Israeli parties that are allied with Likud. None of which has much relevance to my choice between a competent, unexciting center-left Democrat and an ignorant, boorish, egotistical, megalomaniacal narcissistic oaf.

I'm a US citizen, not an Israeli citizen. I vote on the basis of what I think is best for the US.

between keeping your culture (all for that) and treating yourself as an outsider (not at all for that). If there were an easy way to describe what I mean in a few words, I'd be a rich man, but I'll give it a shot.

So let's say I come from a Mumble country, and I want to patronize (or set up) a Mumble-goods store and consume Mumble-language media. And I want to make sure my kids learn to speak Mumble. And I want to socialize with other Mumblers. Well...so far so good. We all have freedom of association, and freedom of speech, and freedom of commerce. And so long as my Mumble store serves everyone who comes through the door, no problems. That's keeping your culture.

The problems can start to crop up when I associate exclusively with other Mumblers. And I don't mean family or friends...that's natural and mostly harmless. I mean that I refuse to patronize non-Mumble businesses. Not just for specialty items like books or newspapers or foods, but for everything. I won't buy a gallon of paint unless it's Mumble paint. I won't let a non-Mumbler work on my car. I won't work at a non-Mumble establishment. That's where there can be room for problems.

And the other thing that I take personal exception to and think is a recipe for disaster is identity block politics. The idea that if I'm a Mumbler and I think there ought to be a law about X, then I have to get other Mumblers to gang up with me to influence policy. If it's something positive, for lack of a better word, then sure...why not. But what sometimes can happen with certain ethno-centric political organization is that it's not positive, it's asking for a hard change and setting up a confrontation of an us and a them where one side is all ethnic and the other side is the Them that isn't Us. And ethnic pride is used as a call to arms to drum up signatures or votes or whatever.

My own belief is that it's not healthy for people to blatantly telegraph their otherness to the rest of society by refusing to engage with them. So while it's OK for me to patronize Mumble businesses, I shouldn't do so exclusively. While it's OK to send my kids to Mumbler schools, I shouldn't discourage them from making non-Mumbler friends. I shouldn't refuse to consume media in English and I shouldn't demand government services in Mumble.

While any one or just a few of those things can be perfectly benign, taken together, it can create divisions between people who should view themselves as fellow citizens. It can build a psychological wall between you and your neighbor. And that's dangerous because walls in the head are the seeds for walls in real life.

Assimilation isn't the same thing as blending. So you have your holidays and schools and shops and friends and language. But you shouldn't wall yourself off from society at large on the grounds that they aren't your people. You
should engage with your fellow Americans and you should have more in common with them ideologically and philosophically than not, so that when you look at each other, he doesn't see some Jew and you don't see some Anglo, but you see your neighbor and fellow citizen. It's about mutual respect for the fragile underpinnings of civilized society.

Did that make any sense?