“The debate about Islam’s compatibility with Western freedoms often seems to have reached an impasse. Everyone knows that most Muslims are not violent extremists or actively working to undermine liberty. Everyone also knows that Muslims are more likely than other communities to support (at least in principle) the coercive imposition of religious norms. Thus, we play the game of essence and accidents: is this or that anti-liberal tendency of a particular Muslim community the result of Islam’s deep essence or of more culturally contingent accidents? I doubt such questions will ever be settled. Not because I think there is no right answer or that Islam doesn’t have an essence — as a Muslim, I am committed to thinking that there is, and it does — but because in a pluralistic society, we should not expect agreement on the essence of any religion.” (11/12/25)
“‘Listen to your own voice,’ Neil Young once remarked. ‘Don’t listen to someone else’s. To me the way to live is to always move forward — to keep searching for whatever it is that interests you.’ At eighty, Young is still a defiantly idiosyncratic songwriter and a singer and instrumentalist so raw and ragged that his music feels like a protest against polish. One of rock’s mad masters of excess, he has always moved too fast, and overdone more or less everything he has turned his gnarled hand to. ‘It’s better to burn out than to fade away,’ he famously declared in a lyric that would find its way into Kurt Cobain’s parting thoughts. And after nearly fifty studio albums and countless live performances, Canada’s spikiest artist is still at it.” (11/12/25)
“I learned basic arithmetic skills in third grade. I wasn’t exceptional; everyone in my public school third-grade class learned them. Of course, we all can now use computers to have calculations done for us in a fraction of a second. But still, somehow we have major national debates that show zero understanding of even the most basic arithmetic. The latest example is the $2,000 tariff dividend check that Trump is promising us. The arithmetic here is about as simple as it gets. We have roughly 340 million people in the country. Let’s say 10 percent don’t get the check because they meet Trump’s category of ‘high-income.’ That leaves over 300 million people getting Trump’s $2,000 checks. That comes to more than $600 billion. Trump’s tariffs are raising around $270 billion. That means we will be paying out $330 billion more in Trump tariff dividend checks than he is raising in tariff revenue.” (11/12/25)
“Of the 10 sections of President Trump’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, the second is the real key to reform. It asks that schools cultivate a ‘vibrant marketplace of ideas on campus’ — exactly what campus radicals have destroyed, reducing higher education to its present appalling condition. But this remedy also exposes the main weakness of the White House’s compact — and of most reform efforts. Asking radical university staff to create ideological diversity is rather like relying on Nancy Pelosi to choose Republican representatives for the Jan. 6 committee. While radicals remain in control of campuses, reform will proceed glacially — if at all. The discrepancy between what we fund the campuses for and what they are doing is enormous. Promotion of knowledge and understanding has given way to inculcation of a poisonous fringe ideology.” (11/11/25)
“When Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) arrives in Washington this week, he comes not as a reformer seeking American approval, but as a ruler who no longer needs it. In the seven years since his last U.S. visit, the Saudi crown prince has transformed his kingdom’s foreign policy, tested the limits of American patience, and discovered the leverage that comes from acting independently of Washington. His return offers a revealing measure of how much both Saudi Arabia — and America’s role in the Middle East — have changed. The last thing Donald Trump should do is undo the forces that compelled these shifts.” (11/12/25)
“In arguing for liberal democracy and against dictatorship, my own tendency is to emphasize a set of common problems all types of societies face in the modern world and to explain why liberalism offers the most practical tools for addressing them. While one might argue that advocating for liberal rights and representative institutions counts as standing ‘for things’ rather than against them, it is possible to advocate in an entirely ‘ameliorative, mitigating spirit’ as Schliesser put it. For societies exhausted by years of open ethnic conflict, or experiencing the always precarious transition from dictatorship to democracy, that mitigating spirit may be more than enough. The practical merit of liberalism for achieving social peace under difficult conditions cannot be overstated. Nevertheless, liberals have no need to settle for this negative vision.” (11/12/25)
Source: Common Dreams
by Medea Benjamin & Nicolas JS Davies
“For decades, Washington has sold the world a deadly lie: that ‘regime change’ brings freedom, that US bombs and blockades can/somehow deliver democracy. But every country that has lived through this euphemism knows the truth: it instead brings death, dismemberment, and despair. Now that the same playbook is being dusted off for Venezuela, the parallels with Iraq and other US interventions are an ominous warning of what could follow. As a US armada gathers off Venezuela, a US special operations aviation unit aboard one of the warships has been flying helicopter patrols along the coast. This is the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR, the ‘Nightstalkers’) the same unit that, in US-occupied Iraq, worked with the Wolf Brigade, the most feared Interior Ministry death squad.” (11/12/25)
Source: Niskanen Center
by Gil Guerra & Claire Holba
“The Venezuelan refugee and migrant crisis has become a key pillar in the administration’s justification for military action. President Trump has accused the Venezuelan government of sending criminal migrants to the U.S.-Mexico border, and stemming the flow of Venezuelan migrants appears to be one of the major motivations guiding current policy. Migration should therefore also be one of the key considerations that policymakers weighing intervention should take into account. Our report attempts to model what new outflows from Venezuela might look like based on different U.S. actions.” (11/12/25)
“Last year, I wrote that it would be very hard to decrease the number of mentally ill homeless people in San Francisco. Commenters argued that no, it would be easy, just build more jails and mental hospitals. A year later, San Francisco feels safer. Visible homelessness is way down. But there wasn’t enough time to build many more jails or mental hospitals. So what happened? Were we all wrong? Probably not.” (11/12/25)
