From the right: Trump and the Two-State Policy
When it comes to US Middle East policy, President Trump certainly is effecting genuine change, says Jonathan Tobin at National Review. By refusing to endorse a two-state solution, he has “seemingly discarded the idea that has been the bedrock principle of US Middle East diplomacy for the past generation.” In doing so, Trump “upset people on both sides.” But he was actually endorsing an “important” diplomatic principle: “The US cannot impose peace on terms that aren’t accepted by the parties, and we shouldn’t behave in a manner that encourages Palestinians’ ongoing refusal to make peace.” For while “it’s clear an overwhelming majority of Israelis want a two-state solution, they understand that the Palestinians have yet to come to terms with Israel’s legitimacy.”
Policy wonk: The Truth About Deportations
Immigration advocates and left-wing politicians responded with despair, anger and outrage to last week’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests of several hundred criminal illegal aliens. But Seth Barron at City Journal notes that “deporting aliens who have committed serious crimes is understood in most nations to be a necessary duty of the state.” Indeed, “nobody thinks twice about deporting criminals in these countries, and immigration enforcement is an uncontroversial aspect of national life.” Fact is, “Canada — often cited by progressives as a model of civilized multiculturalism — deports aliens at almost twice the rate” the US does. And Australia, with “one of the highest rates of deportation in the world,” has a “firm policy” of “intercepting illegal boat migrants and processing them offshore” to prevent them from acquiring refugee status.
Hollywood writer: Why Fact-Checkers Ignore ‘SNL’ Skits
The fact-checkers who are furiously dissecting every word from President Trump and his aides can’t be bothered to do the same to “Saturday Night Live’s” weekly anti-Trump sketches. But blogger Christian Toto recalls that they raked the show over the coals on the rare occasions when it mocked Barack Obama. Back then, “CNN devoted a lengthy segment to [one] sketch, declaring where it was true and how, according to its panel, the jokes missed the mark.” In 2014, The Washington Post did the same with another skit blasting Obama’s executive order on immigration, even defending the fact-check against “serious mockery from conservative news outlets.” But now, “reporters are treating every sketch, particular ones featuring Alec Baldwin as Trump, like an executive order,” just as they “sat on their hands” for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s GOP-bashing.
Mathematician: Alternative Facts? Try Using Google
Big data “was supposed to usher in a more precise and rational world,” says Cathy O’Neil at Bloomberg. But while data “may not lie,” they “can be interpreted in ways that have the same effect.” The bigger problem is “we’re losing trust in numbers, especially statistics” — for which at least some of the blame belongs to algorithms. Why? “They tailor our online environments not to the truth, but to the specific information we search for or click on.” When you type the phrase “Was the Hol” into Google, it autocompletes to “Was the Holocaust real?” And four of the top six search results are Holocaust-denial sites. Moreover, “such steering happens even when we’re not actively searching.”
From the right: The Left Is Collapsing Everywhere
All over Europe, notes Dan Hannan at the Washington Examiner, “traditional parties of the Center-Left have been losing badly.” Britain’s Labor Party has had eight leaders in the past 40 years and “seven of them failed to win a single general election.” What’s the cause? Those parties backed the merger of European currencies, and when “the euro brought poverty to the south and tax increases to the north, voters turned against the politicians whose fingerprints were on the murder weapon.” Moreover, they’re “closely tied to labor unions,” and “membership of those unions, especially those representing private-sector workers, is falling in every industrialized country.” Which is what’s also happening in America.
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann