Pun Salad

Prospective veep nominee Tim Walz made a libertarian-sounding appeal last week in Eau Claire, WI:

Uh, fine. Unfortunately, given the context, it's pretty easy to translate that into what he really means: "Abortion should be legal up to nine months." Pretty much everything else is fair game for being government business.

Still, to honor the actual words, not their speaker, there is our Amazon Product du Jour for you. No political endorsement from Pun Salad implied.

But what I really want to talk about is this WSJ op-ed, with the libertarian headline: The FEC Has No Business Regulating AI.

Reader, the pleasant surprise is: the op-ed is written by Sean Cooksey, chairman of the Federal Election Commission.

A refreshing bit of honesty, and I hope the proposal goes down to ignominious defeat tomorrow.

(See, Governor Walz, that's what "minding your own damn business" really looks like.)

Also of note:

• Speaking of Walz. Robby Soave puts another pin in the Governor's libertarian balloon: Tim Walz Was Dead Wrong About Misinformation and Free Speech.

  Conservatives on social media did manage to dig up an old clip of Walz making an alarming and false claim: "There's no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy."

  Walz is wrong, of course: The First Amendment, which vigorously protects Americans' free speech rights, does not distinguish between good information and misinformation. Moreover, so-called hate speech—an arbitrary category, as different people find different sorts of speech to be hateful—is quite obviously protected.

  Of course, this means that Walz is ignorant about that bit of Constitutional law, inconvenient that he took an oath to support it.

  And, also of course, that means he doesn't think his "mind your own damn business" rule applies here.

• A convenient amnesia. Jim Geraghty points it out: The Media Have Forgotten Why They Exist.

  Between now and Election Day, count the number of “news” stories you read that have a subtext of: Isn’t Kamala Harris awesome? Isn’t Tim Walz awesome? And for that matter, if you go looking in the right-of-center press, you can find stories that amount to: Isn’t Donald Trump awesome? Isn’t J. D. Vance awesome?

  And if you really go looking in some of the deeper corners of the internet, you can find stories arguing that Robert F. Kennedy is awesome, and that that bear cub had it coming.

  […]

  Of course, the news media’s job isn’t, traditionally, to tell you how awesome a presidential candidate is. The campaigns are going to spend a lot of money telling you how awesome the candidate is. The news media is supposed to be giving you a full portrait, warts and all, of the options before you. You’re hiring this person for a four-year contract to run the executive branch and be commander in chief. That is a role with serious responsibilities.

  No, Kamala Harris is not your “Mom-ala,” Tim Walz is not your dad, and Donald Trump is not your daddy.

  Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of a political landscape that is a Hieronymus Bosch painting of human dysfunction is the number of Americans who have forsaken their actual relationships with their actual family members and chosen to project their personal psychodramas onto current events, casting political figures as the family they wish they had.

  Bosch? It's not a pretty picture, Emily.

• Could I suggest "enhanced interrogation"? Nah, probably inappropriate. But Jim Geraghty (yes, again) has some suggestions for The Questions the Media Should Be Asking Kamala Harris. The first set:

  We are told, through your campaign staff, that you no longer hold the positions you espoused when seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. Back then, you supported banning fracking, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, defunding the police, instituting mandatory buybacks of assault weapons, eliminating private health insurance, and guaranteeing federal jobs.

  In 2019, you said you were open to expanding the size of the Supreme Court. Now, a spokesman says you no longer hold that position.

  You spent much of your time in the U.S. Senate and presidential campaign arguing, “We are not going to treat people who are undocumented and cross the border as criminals,” and “an undocumented immigrant is not a criminal.” Now, according to your staff, your position is that “unauthorized border crossings are illegal.” What caused you to change your mind on these issues? Did you learn more that convinced you that your old positions were wrong, unfeasible, or ill-informed? Or is it that those were the positions that you felt were most popular in a Democratic presidential primary, and now you’re running in a general election? What guarantee does any voter have that your new positions won’t be as quickly and quietly abandoned as the old ones once you’re elected?

  I'd suggest something shorter and simpler: "Would you significantly change any current Biden Administration policies, or would a Harris Administration just continue all of them?"

Recently on the book blog:

This book was on the WSJ's list of the best mysteries of 2022; took me awhile, but now I've read 'em all. This one… could have been better.

That is, by the way, similar to what I thought about the other Joël Dicker novel I read ten years ago, The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair. I said that one had a good, twisty plot, but it was accompanied by "cardboard characters, plastic dialog, and leaden prose."

Same here. Although the plot is super twisty, the characters less plastic. And (let's be charitable) the dialog and prose woes could be due to a lackluster translation from the original French.

It's set mostly in Switzerland. A discovered corpse in Room 622 is right on page one. Although we are not told the victim's identity until much further on, and the perpetrator isn't revealed until the very end. Otherwise, the story concentrates on three characters in a love triangle stretching back decades: Lev, son of a failed comedian and actor; Anastasia, whose mother wants her to marry rich; and Macaire, scion of a banking family, who's wangling to take over the bank presidency when his father kicks the bucket.

Ah, but it's an example of autofiction as well. To add another layer of plotting, parts of the book are narrated by an author named Joël Dicker, who's in mourning for his longtime mentor/publisher, and also moaning about a tough breakup with his girlfriend. He takes off to the Hôtel de Verbier, in the Alps, where he makes the acquaintance of Scarlett Leonas, also staying there. They notice an oddity on the resort's sixth floor: room 622 is missing! (Replaced by "621A".) It is soon revealed to them that the room was the site of that murder years back. What happened? Scarlett and Joël turn into amateur sleuths, determined to track down the truth behind the enigma. Might make a good book!

The book's plot, other than the mystery, is very soap-operatic. The characters mostly behave foolishly and dishonestly, engaging in absurd subterfuges that never seem to work out to their satisfaction. Betrayal, jealousy, envy, self-sabotage, irrational hatred, fatal misunderstandings, and many more: they are all here. I assume Dicker ties up all the loose ends that pop up throughout the book by the last page, but I couldn't swear to it.

Reader, here's something I noticed: If two characters arrange a future rendezvous and one says "I promise to be there", then it's a foregone conclusion that he or she won't show up, and the consequences will matter.

Disclaimer: this is one of those books where, in my case, the author, Coleman Hughes, is pushing on an open door. I found myself in violent agreement with just about everything he says here. I'm in no mood to be critical, and have nothing to be critical about.

One of my longtime puzzlements is how counterproductive the "progressive" attitudes toward racial issues in the US are. Their criticisms are unbalanced; their proposed "solutions" seem designed to worsen social ills rather than mend them, stirring up suspicion, resentment, and hostility on all sides.

(When I say "longtime": I recall the 1970s strife accompanying the judge-ordered busing of black and white kids in Boston. This accomplished less than nothing, education-wise.)

This book defends an honorable, and simple, principle: "we should treat people without regard to race, both in our public policy and in our private lives." This ideal has a long and noble history, but has been under attack from the people Hughes dubs "neoracists". He concentrates fire on Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi, who have probably made the most off their anti-colorblindness. But (as we know) the neoracist ideology really worked itself into schools and (even) public libraries, to the exclusion of opposing viewpoints. (I got this book from the UNH Library, but only via Interlibrary Loan from Brandeis.)

Hughes' criticism of neoracism is intense (and convincing). He shows that the neoracists reject the principles encouraged by MLKJr ("content of their character"); they favor racial discrimination, engage in invidious racial stereotyping; redefine the term "racism" to fit their ideology; are "committed to race superiority." All in all, not that different from the nastiest white supremecists.

Solutions? Hughes has worthwhile suggestions:

First, stop thinking of "diversity" as an end in itself, but as a tool to help achieve actually worthy goals. His example is policing, where folks of color would tend to see a lily-white police force as illegitimate. But in most cases, judging on colorblind merit is the way to go.

Second, "racist talk" should be stigmatized no matter its direction.

Third, racial discrimination against minorities should be stopped. For example, the anti-Asian bias in school admissions.

Fourth, the notion that statistical racial disparities are "proof" of racial discrimination needs to be debunked, and ineffective "affirmative action" plans should be junked. Hughes is hard on the term "affirmative action", noting that, taken by itself, it's a meaningless euphemism. ("If you didn't know what it meant, the words themselves would give you no hint.")

So: another sensible book that will be mostly ignored by the people styling themselves as "anti-racists". I wish it were in every library, shelved next to the Kendis and DiAngelos.

Almost done with my mini-project to reread Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels. Left is Poodle Springs, which Chandler did not finish before his death in 1959; Robert B. Parker completed it in 1989. But it still counts as Chandler in my book.

This one, Playback, is considered to be a lesser effort, based on Chandler's screenplay for a movie that never got made. I dug out my 1977 $1.50 paperback, and… I liked it fine! Probably the first time I've read it since 1977, so my memory of the plot was pretty hazy. Oh, heck, I'll admit it: it was nonexistent.

Marlowe is hired over the phone by a supercilious lawyer to track down and follow a lady on the lam, arriving by train in Los Angeles from the east. (On the "Super Chief"!) Details are provided in a visit from the lawyer's comely secretary. But the subject is easy to find ("as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket"). And Marlowe tails her down south to Esmeralda, a nice little seaside resort town.

Violating his client's explicit instructions, Marlowe makes himself known to the subject, and they eventually both find themselves in the usual hot water; Marlowe's not the only one interested in her; she's being blackmailed, and she's fleeing an unpleasant situation. Along the way, Marlowe encounters some very colorful characters.

Would have made a pretty decent movie, I think.