Pun Salad

Returning to our regularly-scheduled programming:

■ Proverbs 25:8 is a strange one:

⁸ What you have seen with your eyes
   do not bring hastily to court,
  for what will you do in the end
    if your neighbor puts you to shame?

I don't know… I am picturing, maybe, an ancient Israel episode of Judge Judy? "Woe be unto him that pisseth on his judge's leg, and swear that it raineth."

Today's Getty image: the dog knows he's seen something, but is about to be put to shame by his neighbor/nemesis, the cat.

■ Jonathan Haidt has a good roundup of the recent imbroglio at Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington: The blasphemy case against Bret Weinstein, and its four lessons for professors. In case you're unaware:

For several years, Evergreen has held a “day of absence” in which students, staff, and faculty of color are invited to stay away from campus and take part in discussions about racism and other intersectional issues, organized by the school’s Director of First Peoples Multicultural Advising Services, Rashida Love. But this year, the event was inverted; people of color were invited to stay on campus while all white people were urged to stay away from campus. White professors were asked to not teach their classes. White students were asked to not attend their classes.

Biology prof Weinstein (who's white) objected, and let Director Love know that he intended to remain on campus and teach his class. At that point, the brown stuff hit the twirly thing; see Haidt's article for the smelly details. He also fits this episode into the context of similar heresies at Yale, Duke, Middlebury, Berkeley, Claremont McKenna, … .

Four lessons are offered to professors, and here's number one:

1) Never object to a diversity policy publicly. It is no longer permitted. You may voice concerns in a private conversation, but if you do it in a public way, you are inviting a visit from a mob or punishment from an administrator.

As always, you are encouraged to peruse the entire article.

Comment: The campus Social Justice Warriors love to pose as victims. Actually, they are much more often aggressors, hoaxers, and demagogues. They inflate any perceived infraction against their theology into "action", leveraging their faux fury into power-play "demands".

■ Kurt Schlicter at Town Hall has a much-noted column: Liberals Are Shocked To Find We’re Starting To Hate Them Right Back. I.e., "we" conservatives—at least some of "us"—are starting to play by the coarse and sometimes violent rules leftists (Schlicter says "liberals") have used for years.

But it's not just "liberals" that earn Schlicter's scorn:

Cue the boring moralizing and sanctimonious whimpering of the femmy, bow-tied, submissive branch of conservatism whose obsolete members were shocked to find themselves left behind by the masses to whom these geeks’ sinecures were not the most important objective of the movement. This is where they sniff, “We’re better than that,” and one has to ask ,“Who’s we?” Because, by nature, people are not better than that. They are not designed to sit back and take it while they are abused, condescended to, and told by a classless ruling class that there are now two sets of rules and – guess what? –the old rules are only going to be enforced against them.

Um. Take that, George F. Will, National Review, et. al.

But here's the thing: if I have to pick a tribe, I'm picking one that is "better than that".

■ Ilya Shapiro writes at Cato about the Fourth Circuit's decision overturning Trump's "travel ban": Courts Shouldn’t Join the #Resistance.

Last week’s travel-ban ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit is a travesty. Not because the underlying policy is anything to write home about. As I wrote when the second executive order came out in March, “[r]efugees generally aren’t a security threat, for example, and it’s unclear whether vetting or visa-issuing procedures in the six remaining targeted countries represent the biggest weakness in our border defenses or ability to prevent terrorism on American soil.” But the judiciary simply can’t substitute its own policy judgment for that of our elected representatives, no matter how well-informed judges may be or how misguided they think our political leaders may be.

Shapiro doesn't like the travel ban. But he likes much less judges who make specious arguments to impose their political judgments. His final paragraph is a take-home:

They told me that if Trump won the presidency, the rule of law would suffer. They were right.

■ KDW@NR muses on the recent DUI woes of Tiger Woods, and the historical ones of Allen Iverson. Yes, they may be schmucks, but they're Schmucks Like Us.

We love a celebrity comeuppance. This is in part an ugly species of envy: Why should Tiger Woods get to live like a Roman emperor just for being really good at a game that is, after all, the very definition of a trivial pursuit? And how good an actor do you really need to be to star in Pirates of the Caribbean? How many hundreds of millions of dollars should someone get just for being pretty? There is something in our puritanical national soul that is satisfied by the fact that those who fly higher have farther to fall. These episodes bring out something ignoble in us. But it isn’t just celebrities, of course: The high and mighty are just the ones we talk about. An astonishing share of lottery winners go broke, and it isn’t because people with low character or weak wills are just lucky with the numbers. People like Tiger Woods and Allen Iverson, who win life’s lottery, often have the same bad luck in the end: the bad luck of being human.

KDW is, as usual, wise about this stuff.