The Dish

Tim Fernholz notes that child labor has fallen substantially around the world since 2000:

Wondering how 168 million child laborers could be a positive thing? Well, the number represents about a third fewer workers aged 5 to 17 than there were in 2000. The fastest decrease in child laborers has come in last four years, even though child advocates had feared an increase because of the global recession. … The [International Labour Organization] points to two major reasons for the recent decrease: The poorer nations where child labor is concentrated recovered more quickly from the global recession, which meant fewer children were forced by impoverishment into child labor. Also, reduced labor demand meant that older children weren’t able to enter the workforce as quickly.

But Harriet Grant stresses that the number is still too high, especially with many working children hidden in the less formal pockets of the economy:

[ILO child labor expert Yoshie] Noguchi said that because the family-based model of working was so common, it remained difficult to tackle child labor through a model of transparency in supply chains. “Consumers can indirectly give a signal to business that they do not want [child labor] and then the supply chains might give a signal to suppliers, but the supply chain is very long now,” she said. “It’s not easy for enterprises to say no, because people can sub-contract down to even a family-based level that nobody comes to inspect. Child labor exists more in that kind of setting than anywhere else.”

Charlotte Huff laments the blame game that is so often associated with cancer diagnoses:

After Linnea Duff learned at age 45 that she had developed lung cancer, she practically encouraged people to ask if she had ever smoked. But in the eight years since, her feelings have soured considerably on the too-frequent question, and she’s developed an acute sense of solidarity with fellow patients: smokers, former smokers, and never-smokers alike.

“It’s just so inappropriate,” says Duff, who believes that people with other serious illnesses don’t field so many intrusive queries. “Would you ask someone, ‘Did you eat too much?’ or ‘Did you have too much sex?’”

Why this line of inquiry persists:

Judgments about behavior not only unsettle and stigmatize the patient, but reflect the interrogator’s own insecurities. Frequently, those disease detectives are attempting to regain a sense of control amid the inherently random and sometimes unjust world that we all reside in, according to researchers who have studied stigma. Psychologists refer to this as the “just-world hypothesis,” a bias in thinking and perception that was first described by psychologist Melvin Lerner and colleagues more than four decades ago, and which has since been documented in numerous books and articles.

Reviewing Charles Murray’s new ebook, American Exceptionalism: An Experiment in History, Richard Gamble finds fault with his understanding of the Founding. The critique is a useful reminder that Charles is not a conservative in the sense of someone who sees everything embedded in the intimations of the past as they relate to the future:

Murray’s preoccupation with innovation ignores more than a century of colonial America’s prior experience in self-government and constitutionalism and its acknowledged debt to ancient, European, and most of all English political theory and practice. It is hard to recognize historical reality in Murray’s depiction of America’s past. America was not sui generis; it was a variation on themes reaching back thousands of years. The republic did not emerge de novo in the New World; it altered—to use the word the Declaration of Independence chose—an existing form of government while announcing the more general right of a people to abolish their government.

Murray complains at one point about “both liberals and conservatives quoting snippets of [the Founders’] writings” to endorse their own views. But Murray’s own snippets are vulnerable to the same charge.

He uses an 1825 letter from Thomas Jefferson to Henry Lee, for instance, to show that after 50 years of reflection Jefferson called the rights language of the Declaration “an expression of the American mind.” If this is true, it comports nicely with Murray’s claim that America transformed an ideology of natural rights into an enduring political creed. But Jefferson’s letter never makes this connection. In fact, the full text of Jefferson’s letter makes a hash out of Murray’s insistence on an America made “from scratch.” The “object of the Declaration of Independence,” Jefferson told Lee, was “not to find new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject.” He continued: “Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind.” And he then cited “Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c.” This letter may not prove a counter-argument against Murray’s claims, but it certainly doesn’t support them.

Larison complements the critique:

This is familiar territory for Prof. Gamble. He wrote a TAC article on the same subject last year, and wrote In Search of the City on a Hill: the Making and Unmaking of an American Myth to investigate the origins and uses of the “city on a hill” rhetoric that now regularly crops up in appeals to American exceptionalism. As he wrote in his article last year, there are two competing traditions of American exceptionalism:

The old exceptionalism was consistent with the ethos of American constitutional democracy; the new is not. The old was an expression of and a means to sustain the habits of a self-governing people; the new is an expression of and a means to sustain a nationalist and imperialist people. The old exceptionalism suited a limited foreign policy; the new suits a messianic adventurism out to remake the world.

As we have seen once again in the last few weeks, Americans have no appetite for such adventurism.

Or “democratizing accuracy,” a euphemistic phrase used by the CEO of TrackingPoint Solutions:

Brian Anderson tested out the company’s precision guided firearm (PGF):

The art of sniping has traditionally been one of complex ballistics. A long-distance shot must be aimed above a target due to the bullet’s drop (gravity) and a slew of other ambient factors that play with projectiles—wind, incline, cant, humidity, temperature, the coriolis effect. TrackingPoint’s system does the exact same real-time ballistics calculation, only it does it for you. …

They call it TTX, short for Tag, Track, Xact. Put very simply, when you tag a target down range the PGFs laser-range finder beams there and back 54 times per second, illuminating the target and measuring the time delay “reflected by the target, providing range measurement accuracy within one meter,” according to the PGF white paper. From here, the system’s on-board ballistic computer realigns your reticle, seen through the PGF’s unique heads-up display, to account for said ambient factors. Squeeze and hold the trigger, and only when your pip perfectly aligns with the reticle will the system’s electronic trigger reset, firing the gun.

How much more lazy could a hunter get? And of course it raises the specter of hunting humans more accurately. The full 20-minute documentary is after the jump:

Yousef Munayyer insists that unification of Israel and the Palestinian Territories into one state has become inevitable:

Everything about the Israeli state’s actual behavior suggests it has no intention of ever leaving the West Bank.

Recognizing that we have a “one-state problem” is the key to peace. The first step is ending discrimination in the law based on ethnicity or religion throughout the entirety of the territory. Palestinians must be part of shaping any future state they will live in, and they can do so only on equal footing with their Jewish counterparts before the law, not under military occupation. For the next steps, numerous historic examples of multi-ethnic democracies exist, including those that made transitions from parallel situations. South Africa is one. It is important to note that while each case is different, and no analogy is perfect, lessons learned from those experiences and examples can inform the path forward for Israelis and Palestinians, even as they simultaneously take into consideration the uniqueness of this case.

Bernard Avishai, on the other hand, claims the proponents of one state are chasing an illusion:

They speak, often sincerely, about Judaism as a religion that could continue to be practiced in a secular state that looks like some idealized Palestine before Zionism spoiled things, with no Hebrew, no history, no literature, no Yehuda Amichai poetry, no Yehudit Ravitz songs—none of that national culture that Quebecers learned long ago requires a state apparatus to protect, and which the provinces shrewdly kept within their jurisdictions. As Peter Beinart says eloquently in the current New York Review of Books, one can also find any number of Jews who deny that Palestinians constitute a nation, and who expect them graciously to disappear from the Land of Israel and assimilate into Jordan, Syria, and the Arab world in general.

In fact, advocates of a two-state solution are not a bunch of naïfs unwilling to see how badly the peace process is doing. They are terrified citizens, trying, against hope, to avoid Bosnia—that is, a terrible, engulfing violence in which memories of the fighting of 1948 will be eclipsed by much greater atrocities, which will leave us with exactly the same problem we had at the start: namely, Canada’s problem. How do you reconcile the fierce desire for national distinction—and the fear of national extinction—with civil rights for all?

Assaf David revisits the possibility of the third and usually unpopular option, a Jordan-West Bank merger:

It seems that all the parties involved might, under some circumstances and preconditions, entertain it. The most important of these for Jordan and the Palestinians is that the confederation would not be the dream scenario of the Israeli right wing: unilateral annexation of parts of the West Bank to Israel and de facto presumption that Jordan will be drawn into managing the remaining Palestinian territory to preserve order. That scenario would make both Jordan and the Palestinians Israel’s worst enemy—something Israel’s leaders don’t really want, either.

A confederation would not be an easy way out for any of the three parties. To get Jordan in, Israel would likely have to agree to something close to the 1967 borders, potentially with a land swap on a one-to-one basis, which would mean evacuating Jewish settlers from the West Bank and giving up on East Jerusalem. However, the confederation might be easier for all the parties to accept at this point than any of the various scenarios involving an independent Palestine.