Oikophobia

James Taranto brought up a term that I hadn't heard of until fairly recently:

Jewish left-wing antipathy toward Israel poses a bit of a puzzle, but not a mystery. Guys like these are sometimes described as "self-hating Jews," but you understand everything if you realize that is a misnomer. They don't hate themselves at all. They have an inflated self-regard that leads them to disdain fellow Jews. It's simply the Jewish variant of oikophobia. (Perhaps someone will think to coin the portmanteau "joikophobia.")

Oikophobia was a theme in the Bill Whittle video I linked to in the post Mordor?.   I can follow Whittle's reasoning most of the way, but I stopped short of going the whole route by calling ones opponents evil.  That represents falling into sort of a trap, I argued.

I have been offering a different thought, which I refer to as "Houston, We have a Solution".  For instance, if the left says we have a problem with using fossil fuels, I say, let's figure out a better way.  If you are inclined to say that there is no better way, well, maybe you could just be wrong.  My proposal is not to engage in the argument over who is right or wrong, but find a common purpose and work from there.  The common purpose is that we need to stop importing so much oil from unfriendly parts of the world.  We also need to improve our trade balance and produce new jobs and new wealth.  Why not do that by conquering space and perfecting fusion energy?

The left wants to impose new costs and burdens on us all.  But is this really necessary?  What if you could produce energy that is clean and affordable at the same time?  That's the promise of fusion energy, advocated by Polywell Fusion and Focus Fusion.  It is also the promise of space solar energy.  Each of these are not economical at this time, but maybe we are a lot closer to that than most people seem to think.

Maybe the dragons that need to be slain are in own minds.  Oikophobia posits that, but it also points the blame to someone else.  Perhaps you could find it by looking in the mirror, since it could be that you are seeing the mote in your brother's eye.  Our respective  ideologies could be making us stupid and we just cannot see what is plainly in front of us. 

Pointing fingers is not leadership.   People should ask themselves what they could do better that is not being done now.