Pun Salad

Consumer note: Holy cow, I do not recommend that you pay (as I type) $39.99 at Amazon for the mass market paperback in "Used: Acceptable" condition. (Original price $2.95) It's a good book, but…

My edition is an Ace 95¢ paperback, purchased … long ago, I guess. I'm pretty sure I read a school library version back sometime in the 1960s, and not since. I remembered some, not a lot.

It is one of Heinlein's later juveniles, originally published in 1955. The protagonist is Rob Walker, who is looking to take his "Advanced Survival" class final. Which involves being transported via a titular "tunnel" to an uninhabited planet with only whatever supplies he can carry. But the test only lasts a few days, so fatalities are rare.

But not this time. An exploding nova screws up the interstellar pathway; Rod and his classmates are stranded with no indication whether they might be rescued anytime, or at all. Not all the local fauna is friendly, but much of the real danger is (dun dun DUN) some of Rod's fellow students.

So there's a lot of Heinlein tropes here: not one, but two, wisdom-dispensing mentors. A lot of Heinlein dialog. A lot of implicit commentary on political authority and stable community building. It's like a fictional version of John Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government! But there are also overtones of Lord of the Files, albeit with older kids.

And it really shows Heinlein's struggle with 1950s "juvenile" straightjacket. There's a surprising amount of adult behavior going on. (Hey, where do you think those babies are coming from.) And Rod is far from perfect: he's occasionally hot-headed, petulant, and careless.

Overall, I'd rank it just below the top tier of Heinlein's juvies. (But much of that is due to personal taste, not cosmic critical faculties.)

Our Eye Candy du Jour is provided by those Reason cutups with the latest episode of Great Moments in Unintended Consequences.

In a departure from the usual: no US-based politicians are lampooned. I await episode 17.

Also of note:

• Still got a bee in my bonnet about "student loan forgiveness". Fresh off yesterday's fisking of a semi-literate reality-challenged advocacy, we have Peter Jacobsen's analysis of the latest orchestral manoeuvres in the dark: Student Loan Payment Freeze, Debt Forgiveness Becoming Permanent. He's been following the labyrinthine schemes to shift debt from the debtors to oblivious taxpayers, and has the latest:

  […] we’re seeing another sign of the permanent shift caused by the pandemic payment freeze. Just this month, Biden’s Department of Education froze loan payments for millions of borrowers while the department continues to recalculate their payments to be only 5 percent of their income. This is down from 10 percent.

  That’s right, the generous SAVE plan just got even more generous, which means that the future taxpayer will be responsible for picking up the slack of higher tax payments when interest income falls.

  Why do the payments need to be frozen while the recalculation is processed? Why not have all borrowers make their payments up until the new payment amounts are calculated? Because temporary Covid policies instituted during the Trump administration have become the permanent norm for the Department of Education.

  And note that all this jiggery-pokery was originally invoked as an emergency temporary measure to deal with hardships caused by the pandemic. Which Biden has proclaimed that he saved us all from. As Jacobsen notes, it's an instance of Milton Friedman's general rule: “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”

• When you believe the rabble can be easily swayed by seductive verbiage. Paul D. Miller describes The Problem With Blaming Words for Political Violence.

  Blaming words for the violence that follows sets a bad precedent. This would become an all-encompassing tool of censorship. If any criticism is the moral equivalent of incitement, we have no free speech. We’re obligated to self-censor; we sacrifice speech to eliminate even the smallest possibility that violence might follow from the extremists and the unstable among us.

  Of course, criticism is allowed, and the assassination attempt on Trump does not inoculate him against criticism any more than the pipe bombs inoculated Obama. Trump is a threat to democracy and we shouldn’t stop ourselves from saying so. We shouldn’t let the threat of terrorist violence have a heckler’s veto over our speech. Trump’s brush with an assassin’s bullet does not turn him into a saint or a hero.

  Disclaimer: unlike Miller, I don't think Trump is much of a threat to democracy. But (warning: possible gun imagery ahead) he's on target when he points out that we shouldn't refrain from criticism because it might set off some lunatic. Like that mythical Brazilian butterfly causing a Texas tornado.

• A useful explanation. Kat Rosenfield has a credible one: How Culture Got Stupid. A key point blames:

  The tenets of the new cultural criticism were as follows:

  • All art was political, and always had been;

  • Art with the wrong politics caused harm, especially to women and people of color;

  • And all art must be analyzed through the lens of power, privilege, and progressive pieties.

  The whole thing had a frantically performative vibe that bordered on the evangelical—with journalists in the role of the youth pastor palpably desperate to keep you going to church. “It’s fun to think about this stuff,” pleaded one representative essay at the viral trend site Uproxx, begging readers to devote themselves to woke critique with the same enthusiasm with which they once debated the bloodlines of the Targaryen dynasty. “Are you telling me that it’s cool to argue for hours about who Azor Ahai is, but a ten-minute discussion of race, gender, and shifting sensibilities before rewatching an ’80s classic is somehow wasted time? Get out of here.”

  Ms. Rosenfield's essay is wide-ranging and insight-filled. Also, she has recommendations for us media-consumers. (I really have to watch Ricky Stanicky, I guess.)