On behalf of the right-wing, I’d like to apologize for all the violent rhetoric coming from our side recently. It was really just a misunderstanding. You see, we thought it was just a game. We sat by, patiently for the last eight years, thinking it was your turn. When Obama was elected, we assumed it was now our turn.
We’re sorry. We didn’t know we weren’t allowed to play.
What’s that? We aren’t allowed to quit and it’s still your turn?
</sarcasm>
Really, get a little bit of perspective. Political history is full of dumb threats and heated rhetoric.
If you seriously follow politics, you uncover all sorts of undercurrents that explain a lot of what you see on the surface. You begin to see the echo chambers, where the various trends amongst various factions and how lines of arguments are formed.
Take for instance, the recent stories about Rush Limbaugh moving to Costa Rica if the health care bill passed. First off, it doesn’t make sense for Rush to have said that as it’s being portrayed because of the historical context on the right regarding such statements made during the Bush era. Limbaugh and others poked a great deal of fun at the Alec Baldwins of the world who proclaimed the end of America and promised to leave if Bush was elected/re-elected. You can dismiss it as Rush being hypocritical, but that’s a cop-out. He’s a hugely successfully polemicist, with a following of millions for decades now. One doesn’t get that large a following for that long by being obviously inconsistent.
So where are these stories coming from? A few years ago, an organization called Media Matters was formed. It was formed as a left-wing version of the Media Research Center (which is a right-wing organization critical of left-wing media bias). It is very well funded, and has people examining all the major right-wing commentators on a daily basis, and have an extensive network of contacts to get out news stories they want pushed. They are capable of driving news stories in the left-wing echo chamber (ironically, much as Rush is able to drive stories in the right-wing echo chamber). Media Matters has strong ties to the Clinton political faction of the Democrats, and frequently advances their interests (I remember them pushing a number of anti-Obama stories during the primaries), often at the cost of intellectual integrity. Their statistical work is poor and they frequently take quotes out of context, such as the Rush Limbaugh/Costa Rica quote. If you listen to the Media Matters clip, it ends quickly after the statement is made.
Rush commented the next day on the whole deal, and basically said that he didn’t want to be part of socialized system – he wanted personal, private health care, and he would be able to receive that in Costa Rica, so he would fly down there to get it. Not exactly the absurd statement people have made it out to be.
From the LA Times:
In one case last year, U.S. special operations forces killed an Al Qaeda-linked suspect named Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan in a helicopter attack in southern Somalia rather than trying to capture him, a U.S. official said. Officials had debated trying to take him alive but decided against doing so in part because of uncertainty over where to hold him, the official added.
U.S. officials find such options unappealing for handling suspects they want to question but lack the evidence to prosecute.
Progressives wanted to turn the war in terror into a law-enforcement action.
These are the consequences.
I got into an argument with a number of anti-Proposition 8 (defining marriage in California) people a while ago, and I’ve been chewing over the discussion in my head for a while. There are two fundamental issues at play here: outcome and process. I’m a bit of a fence sitter on the outcome – as a Christian, I can’t argue against the fact that homosexuality is pretty clearly labeled as a sin. So, at a basic moral level, it’s wrong and should be discouraged.
But at the same time, I’m faced with a persuasive argument for toleration – that is people should be allowed to make their own choices and follow their own path through life. Christianity has develop the ability to tolerate other religions, which is a far more fundamental moral conflict than homosexuality. After all, if one can tolerate marriages blessed in the name of another god, which is a violation of the Ten Commandments, it strikes me that it’s possible to tolerate two guys getting married.
So I’m sorta conflicted on the issue, and I can see merit to both sides. This is a fundamentally philosophical and cultural issue, and positions are evolving and changing within society. People need to debate, and compromises need to be made within the public sphere. The last thing that needs to happen, however, is for this issue to become a legal one – taken out of the hands of the public and tossed about within the esoteric world of the courts. That is where the issue of Prop 8 comes in.
Prop 8 passed in California back in 2008. It was a plebiscite. Ever since then, there has been a nasty backlash amongst gay activists against supporters of Prop 8, mainly against Christians and Mormons. That aside, they’ve also mounted legal challenges to the Constitutional Amendment. The case is largely without standing, as the supporters followed all the rules for getting the proposition on the ballot, and the election was as free and fair as any in the US. It doesn’t violate California law, as it’s a constitutional amendment, which trumps any other statue. And if it had been in any way improper the California Attorney General, Jerry Brown, would have had it thrown out, as he was very sympathetic to the anti-Prop 8 side.
The only argument I’ve heard in support of their case is that it violates the 14th amendment. This strikes me as being absurd on it’s face, as the 14th amendment was designed to deal with issues of citizenship and specifically race. After all, it took another amendment to grant women the right to vote. The government regulates who may and may not marry in other respects already – states define at what age people may marry, how many people can be in a marriage, how close the relation between people can be that get married. The equal-protection clause doesn’t mean that the laws must be written to treat everyone equally, but rather that the laws must be applied equally to everyone (that is, the police can’t arbitrarily decide to whom various laws apply to, but those laws don’t need to affect everyone equally). If the former were the case, then the graduated income tax would be illegal.
This isn’t the civil-rights era all over again, where substantial segments of society were either legally barred or intimidated from participating in government. Certainly the gay-rights crowd was an active participant in the Prop-8 debate and subsequent vote. There was a lengthy debate and a free and fair vote. The outcome might not be the correct one, but it was justly arrived at. I understand that majority rule isn’t always right, and that the founders put in checks and balances against mob mentality, but here’s the thing – you aren’t going to fund a better method for dealing with social issues than that. The anti-Prop 8 crowd might want to put their faith in a friendly judiciary, but that’s like putting one’s faith in a benevolent despot – after all, it was the courts that gave us Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson.
People’s minds change. Case law is much harder. Look at prohibition. People wanted it, discovered it was a mistake, and corrected it just 14 years later. Now look at socially divisive court cases. Dred Scott led to civil war. Plessy v. Ferguson lasted nearly 60 years. We’re still suffering the fallout from Roe v. Wade.
When it comes to philosophical issues, the only proper jury is the whole community. Attempting to impose an outcome by judicial fiat, as is being attempted by the anti-Prop 8 crowd, will only make the situation worse. Get the community to agree with you, don’t have some random judge force your opinion on people.
From the Cato Institute:
The rationale for your proposed tax on high-cost health insurance plans is that it would encourage people to purchase less-comprehensive coverage and thereby reduce health care spending.
If that’s a good idea, then why is it bad when insurers raise premiums?
I didn’t really intend to do two Global Warming posts in a row, but after talking to some friends that said they were completely ignorant of Climategate, I thought I’d post about it. A few months ago, hackers broke into and stole the e-mail records of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. This is one of the most influential Global Warming research outfits in the world. They were heavily influential on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that proclaimed the Global Warming situation dire.
It turns out that they have been engaged in some very shady things – blocking research critical of their findings, “losing” raw data so their findings couldn’t be checked, circumventing Freedom of Information Requests. Eventually, the head of the CRU had to step down. Yesterday, he was questioned by the British Parliament. The Guardian (which isn’t exactly a right-wing, global warming denier outfit) has a rather unflattering writeup. A few quick highlights:
But for the first time he did concede publicly that when he tried to repeat the 1990 study in 2008, he came up with radically different findings. Or, as he put it, “a slightly different conclusion”. Fully 40% of warming there in the past 60 years was due to urban influences. “It’s something we need to consider,” he said.
Also:
[T]he committee will be hard pressed to ignore the issue after the intervention of no less a body than the Institute of Physics. In 13 coruscating paragraphs of written evidence to MPs, it spoke of “prima facie evidence of determined and coordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law”, “manipulation of the publication and peer review system”, and “intolerance to challenge … which is vital to the integrity of the scientific process.” Ouch.
Ouch indeed.
A post over at Watts Up With That a few months ago caused quite a stir in the global warming debate. I meant to post about it then, but forgot until now.
Of particular note over the last few years was the “Hockey Stick Graph”, which showed a rapid rise in temperatures, and is featured frequently in discussions on Global Warming. The graph has come into some controversy, as a growing number of people question it’s accuracy. But the unique thing about the Watts Up With That post is that it puts aside those arguments and says, “Let’s assume it’s correct for a minute. Let’s look at it in the context of historical ice-core samples from Greenland and the Antarctic”. The result, to my mind, is pretty damning of the hysteria surrounding Global Warming.
In it, it shows that, if one frames the graph over the last 600 years or so, you end up with a picture very similar to the Hockey Stick graph. But, as one stretches out the view to include more time, the change in temperature becomes smaller and smaller, eventually becoming irrelevant when compared to the much larger variations that have occurred over the last half-million years.
I wanted to get some sort of confirmation of what I was seeing, and sure enough, I checked out the Wikipedia article on Ice Cores, and there was a plotting of Vostok Ice Core data the mirrored what was compiled by Watts Up With That.
In fact, one gets the impression that the whole of modern human civilization has occurred during a relatively brief warm period, and that the temperature variations we’ve seen over the last hundred or so years are insignificant compared to what happens naturally. Perhaps we should stop worrying about how to deal with things beyond our control and focus on things that we can. Clean, renewable sources of energy are worth-while in their own right, not because the world is going to end in the next ten years.
Reportedly, Dubai is looking for twenty-six suspects in the murder of the Hamas commander a few weeks ago. Twenty-six suspects? Seriously, a small army was sent to kill the guy?
