If a married pastor speaks out against polygamy even while he himself is having an affair, does that make him a hypocrite?
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Attacking Iraq as part of a War on Terror is the strategic equivalent of attacking the Evangelical Lutheran Church in order to stop abortion clinic bombings. Hey, abortion clinic bombers are Christians and Lutherans are Christians, so it's all the same, right?
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Milton Friedman may be as responsible as much as anyone for what Kevin Carson calls vulgar libertarianism, "faux 'free market' analysis that consists of an apologetic for big business." But that's okay, in some ways I'm a vulgar libertarian myself; as the "free market," like anarchy, is an unattainable ideal, there's an argument for working in the system to win as much freedom as politically feasible - even if the rich get richer in the process. Friedman, who died yesterday at 94, was a courageous fighter for ending the draft, drug legalization, and deregulation. And several of his other proposals were in the "less bad" category. While school vouchers is a bad idea, in general if we are to live with wealth redistribution, it's better to put the money directly in the hands of the recipients through Friedman-inspired ideas like the Earned Income Tax Credit, than through more bureaucratic-oriented forms of welfare.
Reading Free to Choose as a college freshman certainly had a profound influence on me, and I suspect he more than any other person made free market economics intellectually acceptable and politically popular.
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I see that another Rocky movie is coming out, and that in the movie he comes out of retirement. This is at least ten years too late to be remotely plausible. Sylvester Stallone is sixty, for goodness' sakes.
Rocky is to Stallone what Star Wars is to George Lucas, or what Psycho was to Tony Perkins. A magnificent, career-making movie becomes a drug, a habit; the artist keeps going back to the same well because he doesn't know what else to do. It's a shame. That said, I hope Rocky Balboa doesn't suck.
James Leroy Wilson's one-man magazine.
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I think it makes him an adulterer more than a hypocrite. If he then married his mistress as a second wife, he'd be a hypocrite.
ReplyDeleteI'd say it was more of a mote and beam in the eye situation.
ReplyDeleteWill Rocky be boxing in the new film? It would make more sense for him to mentor a young boxer or some such thing.