Pun Salad

Well, we will see. The day is young.

Martin Gurri wonders Why all this Trump hysteria?.

Gurri may be a tad optimistic. But see what you think.

Also of note:

• How to lie with statistics. Jeffrey H. Anderson reveals Another Gavin Newsom Whopper.

  “Can you explain this migration, out of California and going to red states?” moderator Sean Hannity asked California governor Gavin Newsom during his recent debate with Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Newsom confidently replied, “You mean the last two years, more Floridians going to California than Californians going to Florida? By the way, that’s going to be fun to fact-check.”

  Newsom twice repeated his claim, stating the third time, “We just established more Floridians coming to California in the last two years than the other way around.” DeSantis replied, “We didn’t establish it. You just asserted it.” Newsom responded, “It’s a fact.”

  Newsom’s claim is nowhere near the truth. Rather, it’s a prime example of the use and abuse of statistics, aided and abetted by the mainstream media.

  Anderson notes that Newsom left out the phrase "on a per-capita basis" that he sometimes inserts into that assertion. That would make it more accurate, although there's room to argue about that.

  But Anderson goes on to note that there's no particular reason to measure interstate migration on a per-capita basis. It's just the only way to make California's out-migration look better, so Newsom seized on it. And the "fact checkers" docilely go along with that.

• Warning: linked article contains the phrase "flagship of suck". Matt Taibbi has the latest: Tireless Busybodies Again Target Substack.

  Substack is under attack again. The crusade is led by a site contributor, Jonathan Katz, whose style might be characterized as embittered-conventional, i.e. toting the same opinions as every mainstream editorialist, only angrier about it. There’s been more of this genre on offer here as staff positions for talking-point-spouters dry up in legacy shops, but hey, it’s a free country. If you want braying about fascism, Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, the lab leak theory, and other #Resistance horrors you’d hear about if you just left MSNBC on in a corner — or feel deprived of headlines like “What Ron DeSantis and a Norwegian mass murderer have in common” — Substack’s got you covered. It’s not my idea of what alternative media’s for, but fortunately, nobody asked me. Why should I care what other people read?

  Katz does. Though this site is a true content free-for-all, where you can find everything from serialized graphic novels to Portuguese “dark storytelling” to bagel bites recipes, a microcosm of the old Internet where the randomness of being able to hop from Bigfoot to Buddhism is a key part of the free vibe, Katz believes he’s detected a malicious pattern. He aims to put a stop to it, by deplatforming Substack contributors he doesn’t like. A group letter is being organized, demanding action, following Katz’s stern argument in the Atlantic, “Substack Has a Nazi Problem.”

  As an aside: a big reason people read Substack is because of the terribleness of magazines like The Atlantic, which is edited by a guy, Jeffrey Goldberg, who won a pile of awards for blowing the WMD story in spectacular fashion for years on end, making him a walking, talking symbol of the failing-upward dynamic in corporate media. If that magazine wants people to read Substack less, it might consider not filling its pages with exposés about the Alfa Server fantasies or plaintive defenses of the Steele dossier or other transparent propaganda, instead of demanding deplatforming here.

  Bottom line: Katz found a handful of sites displaying "some variation of a swastika".

  I don't know if he even bothered to look for Communists. For example this guy. In terms of historical body count, they have the Nazis badly beat. (But maybe we're supposed to measure that on a "per-capita" basis too?)

• Because honest leftists know that liberty is their enemy. Nate Silver explains Why liberalism and leftism are increasingly at odds.

  Up above I wondered if we could get through the day without looking at the university presidents. Reader, Silver's essay starts out by looking at the university ladies, Gay, Magill, and Kornbluth. So let's skip down a bit:

  The essay “Why I Am Not A Conservative” by the Nobel Prize winning economist F.A. Hayek is a must-read for anybody who wants to understand how liberalism was traditionally defined in the Enlightenment political tradition and how the term came to be used in a rather different way in the United States. To simplify: liberalism is a political philosophy that’s centered around individual rights, equality2, the rule of law, democracy, and free-market economics. There are many flavors of liberalism that emphasize these components in different ratios, running from more libertarian variants to others that see a much larger role for government.

  In Europe, liberalism arose in opposition to a more conservative social hierarchy — usually, feudal monarchies backed by incredibly powerful churches. So if you were looking toward Europe, it made sense to think of liberalism as denoting change. As Hayek points out, however, the United States was founded on liberal, Enlightenment ideas. Appeals to classical liberalism are in some ways appeals to American tradition, therefore. Nonetheless, left-wing “American radicals and socialists” began calling themselves “liberal” because they wanted a departure from these traditions, Hayek wrote. Thus, in the United States, we wound up in a confusing position where “liberal” can either be a synonym for “left-wing” or can refer to European-style liberalism.

  The mainstream media almost always uses the former definition (“liberal” just means left). However, in Hayek’s view — and mine — we should return to the original definition of liberalism. That’s because liberalism describes something distinctive. It doesn’t suffice to view liberalism as a halfway point between socialism and conservatism, Hayek thought, because in important ways it differs from both, namely in its elevation of individual rights and suspicion of central authority. Instead, he imagined a triangle that looked like this, with socialism and conservatism as two flanks and liberalism in the third corner:

  

  That makes a lot more sense to me than the one-dimensional spectrum. Sliver goes on to argue that the "socialism" corner has largely been debunked, but has been subsumed into what he calls "Social Justice Leftism (SJL)". AKA "wokeism". And how those folks revealed themselves as Hamas cheerleaders.

• Casey Jones you better watch your speed. David Ditch is probably not high on cocaine when he says America Taking a High-Speed Train to Bankruptcy. Looking at Uncle Stupid's recent allocation of taxpayer money on choo-choos:

  [California's] High-Speed Rail Authority will receive $3.1 billion to continue its singularly awful 520-mile boondoggle from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Following its initial approval in a 2008 referendum, the project has racked up an impressive list of failures over the course of 15 years, including an increase in the estimated cost from $33 billion to over $128 billion; a delay in the estimated completion date from 2020 to at least 2033; and a 2022 New York Times expose revealing many details of California's staggering incompetence and overregulation.

  While the project has been beset with then-unforeseen problems, it was primarily undermined by fundamental flaws that should have doomed it from the beginning.

  "Should have" because unfortunately both California and the federal government refuse to let this boondoggle die. Even with Washington's latest $3.1 billion injection, the project needs an additional $7 billion just to complete its initial 117-mile segment from Merced to Bakersfield.

  I should point out that Amtrak's Downeaster, which rumbles through my town of Rollinsford a few times per day, also got some bucks dumped on it. And that was ballyhooed by my state's senators and my CongressCritter:

  Passenger rail is good for our local economy and quality of life.
  
  This investment in our rail infrastructure will improve safety, reliability, and efficiency for commuters and tourists across the region.
  
  ➡️https://t.co/ZRWp5Xsi6D pic.twitter.com/k7Korza0mI

  — Rep. Chris Pappas (@RepChrisPappas) December 11, 2023

  I was tempted to reply: no, it isn't; no, it won't.

  And (digs out calculator) that $27 million is a whopping 0.87% of the $3.1 billion going to California's boondoggle.

  But that's not important. It's another example of actual trickle-down economics.

  1. Your Federal Government takes your money.
  2. After taking a cut, sends it back to you.
  3. Well, no. Not back to you, but to people it thinks you should have spent your money on.
  4. And your elected representatives tell you that will (somehow) trickle down to your (eventual) benefit.
  5. And they will claim they did you a huge favor.

Recently on the book blog:

This book got an Edgar "Best Novel" nomination early this year, so onto the "get at library" list it went. The Portsmouth (NH) Public Library helpfully provides the subject classifications, and one is:

True crime stories -- Fiction

Things start out more or less conventionally: the book's narrator, Gage Chandler, is a reasonably successful "true crime" author. A previous book, The White Witch of Morro Bay was even made into a movie! But now his publisher has asked him to look into a lurid crime committed in Milpitas, California years ago. Gage's writing process involves him moving into the scene of the crime. the titular "Devil House".

The author, John Darnielle, takes the reader on many unexpected detours and twists along the way, including stylistic changes, even typographical changes (mercifully brief). We keep coming back to that White Witch book; it's clear that remains kind of a touchstone for Gage. We only gradually learn about the Milpitas murders, the backstories of the characters involved, the Devil House's history (most recently, "Monster Adult X", a porn store). As Gage investigates and interviews, the creepiness of his efforts keeps increasing.

I liked the book quite a bit, although I would imagine some readers might find it ultimately unsatisfying.