Beware of “Gotcha” Politics

Whenever I see some outrageous statement attributed to a politician or other political figure, I tend to be skeptical. It’s not that I think people can’t have outrageous views, or make outrageous statements. But it’s been my experience that nine times out of ten the quote in question has been taken out of context or otherwise distorted, and that when viewed fairly and in context, the quote is almost always not nearly as outrageous as it might seem standing alone, and in many cases is perfectly defensible. Even when it seems as if there is just no way that a given quote could be defensible no matter the context, I tend to balk. After all, I’ve seen quotes in the past where I thought there was no way adding context would make them not outrageous, yet once I saw the context they seemed perfectly fine. I would almost go so far as to say that the worse a given quote appears standing alone, the more likely it is that it will turn out, upon inspection, to be no big deal. Politicians are not idiots, after all (well, some of them are, but they tend to hide it well).

I saw a particularly egregious example of this today. According to ABC news, Bill Clinton said at a recent campaign rally that to fight global warming “we just have to slow down our economy and cut back our greenhouse gas emissions.” Here’s the video.

No Country For Old Men

This is a film that, as the cliche goes, works on several different levels.

Give Gaza to Egypt

Conversations about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict tend to be rather like the Israeli/Palestinian conflict itself, quickly descending into a series of escalating attacks and counter-attacks, bitterness and recriminations. I don’t know if the conflict is really capable of being resolved in any satisfactory way, certainly not in the foreseeable future, but unless we want to just throw up our hands and admit defeat (not a bad strategy, actually), we need to be open to new and creative ways of resolving the conflict.

On that note, Jewish World Review has an interesting article up today by Daniel Pipes (yes, yes, I know) suggesting that Israel should try and solve its current difficulties in Gaza by giving the strip back to Egypt.

Washington and other capitals should declare the experiment in Gazan self-rule a failure and press President Husni Mubarak of Egypt to help, perhaps providing Gaza with additional land or even annexing it as a province. This would revert to the situation of 1948-67, except this time Cairo would not keep Gaza at arm’s length but take responsibility for it.

Culturally, this connection is a natural: Gazans speak a colloquial Arabic identical to the Egyptians of Sinai, have more family ties to Egypt than to the West Bank, and are economically more tied to Egypt (recall the many smugglers’ tunnels). Further, Hamas derives from an Egyptian organization, the Muslim Brethren.

In Praise of Flip-Flopping

I used to be against flip-flopping, but now I’ve changed my mind. Allow me to explain.

What To Do About Child Labor

Via Mark Shea, here is an interesting piece from Inside Catholic advocating an end to child labor laws in the United States.

Now I expect that to many the very notion that we should abolish laws restricting child labor will seem shocking and scandalous. The very term conjures up images of eight year olds in sweatshops, working long hours in poor conditions, to the detriment of their education and possibly even their health. It is something no parent could wish for their child.

Which is exactly the point. The vast majority of parents do not want their children to work, and certainly if the work involves poor conditions or interferes with a child’s education, almost any parent would do whatever they could to prevent this from happening. Outside of cases of severe poverty, therefore, no law restricting child poverty will be necessary, as parents themselves will either keep their children out of the workforce altogether, or allow it only on a limited and highly controlled basis (i.e. paper-routes, summer jobs, and the like). If, however, the choice is between having one’s children work and having them or their siblings starve, many parents will reluctantly allow their children to work, and in such a case telling a parent that his children cannot work is tantamount to telling him he must watch them die. At best, then, child labor laws will be a redundancy; at worst a cruelty.

On Learning to See: What is Said and What is Done

And God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. – Genesis 1:3

The awesome majesty and power of God can be seen in this: that not only is His word law, His word is reality. He says “let there be light” and simply by saying this, there is light. He says “let the earth bring forth living creatures” and it does. Reality itself is in utter conformity to His will, and is molded to His thought.

Human beings are made in the image of God, but they are not like God in this respect. We cannot, simply by speaking, conform reality to our will. We cannot make the world a certain way simply by commanding it to be that way.

On Learning to See

To see what is in front of one’s nose needs constant struggle. – George Orwell

When I was in law school, one of my professors told me about a rather interesting psychological study. The participants in the study were taken to a basketball game and told to try and keep track of the number of times the ball was passed in the game from one person to another. During the game, a man in a giant bee costume was brought out onto the court, and danced around a bit while the game was going on. The interesting thing (and the real purpose of the study) was that after the game, many of the participants had no recollection of a guy in a giant bee costume coming onto the court. They were so focused on one thing (keeping track of the number of passes) that they did not notice what was right there for anyone to see.

Juno

Something weird is going on in Hollywood.

Writers of the World, Unite!

It appears that the Writers’ Guild of America, which has been striking for better internet residuals for the last two months, has itself been struck. According to the New York Post, the 19 unionized staff members of the WGA’s East Coast branch office are upset about the WGA revising its contract with the workers after negotiation to take out a wage increase.

Seeing the story put me in mind of a recent commentary by Rob Long, on the relations between Hollywood writers and the other, non-creative unions in Hollywood. According to Long, writers tend to be, perhaps understandably, impatient with union rules and restrictions on movie sets, which often slow down production, and are constantly trying to get their production crews to bend or ignore them. I don’t have a dog in the fight between the WGA and the studios, but it does seem to me that any claim to worker solidarity the WGA is now making is undercut by the lack of solidarity they show to other unions generally.