Pun Salad

But he's making that difficult to resist:

Hayek nails it again 😂 pic.twitter.com/uot5QBGs4r

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 8, 2024

I'm going to keep calling it "Twitter", though.

Also of note:

• They got scooped, and they're pissed. I'm no fan of sloppily slapping ideological labels on people you don't like. (Disclaimer: I am probably not innocent of that sin, although I'm trying hard to be better.)

  For a (minor) example, today's edition of my awful local newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat, has a story about a shady pol (but I repeat myself): NH House candidate in Dover area who faced investigation exits race.

  I'm not that interested in the sordid details, you can dig those out of the links if you want. Instead, this bit caught my eye [bold added]:

  Kennedy, a former state representative from Manchester under the name Andrew Bouldin, has been the subject of news stories by NH Journal, a right-wing media outlet, regarding an investigation into him by the Manchester Police Department in 2023. A police report was obtained by Foster's Daily Democrat and Seacoastonline. Kennedy was never charged.

  Quibble: as near as I can tell, NHJournal had one story about Kennedy, posted back on August 15, not "stories": the one linked to in the quoted paragraph above.

  But what I really want to point out is that "right-wing" label.

  Yes, NHJournal has a conservative slant. It's far from "right-wing". (They'll even publish dissenting views: (here's a recent example).

  But the label is not just inaccurate, it's gratuitous. It's totally irrelevant to the Foster's story, unless…

  Ah: unless it's the paper's subtle ass-covering excuse for not covering the story themselves. There's an air of bitter resentment that they were scooped on this weeks ago. It's information they knew about, but decided to withhold from their readers, even shorn of its icky right-wingitude.

• 

  I've never called her a Commie. But… Also recently in my worthless local newspaper, an opinion column from local bearded sage Ron McAllister. who claims: Kamala Harris is neither a commie nor an idiot. And he fits right in with the theme of the previous item: sloppy ideological labelling:

  In recent weeks, Kamala Harris has been called a fascist, a Marxist, a communist and a socialist. You don’t need to know the precise historical meaning of these words, of course. They all imply the same thing — that Kamala Harris is “foreign” and therefore dangerous. Labeling is far easier than linguistic accuracy. If you don’t have an argument as to why people should vote for you, calling the opposition scary names might help.

  The accusers are not trying to make an actual argument. Their purpose is to spread fear that foreign and dangerous things will happen if the opposition is elected. The litany of tired, old “isms” can still frighten voters. That’s the goal.

  Now, McAllister provides a few paragraphs with brief and tedious high-school-level definitions of "fascism", "socialism", "Marxism", and "Communism". And he's correct that it's wrong and facile to hammer the square peg of Kamala into the round holes of any of these ideologies.

  We won't even bother to provide examples of the labels folks attach to Trump. I'm sure MacAllister deplores them too, although he doesn't get around to condemning them.

  But what I really wish he'd said is something George Orwell pointed out seventy-eight years ago:

  The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.

  And ditto for those other labels MacAllister denies apply to Kamala.

  But he merely asserts without evidence that Kamala is "not an idiot either."

  Now, I prefer the terms "nitwit" and "phony" over "idiot". But that's me. To resurrect a link I posted a few days back: Harris' problem: She's a complete phony.

  It’s not that she’s liable to pull a literal face-plant the way Mr. Biden was; it’s that she has a tendency to get stuck in catchphrase loops when she speaks about subjects with which she is not comfortable or familiar. When she’s out of her depth on a topic, she sounds like it, and everyone listening knows that she has no idea what she’s talking about.

  I would love for both Trump and Kamala to be asked at their debate about the last serious non-fiction books they read, and what they liked and disliked about them.

• If Google honchos are as smart as it think they are… They should seriously consider Andy Kessler, who wonders in the WSJ: Is the Google Breakup Coming? He distinguishes between a government-mandated breakup, and one that the company could do itself:

  Self-directed breakups don’t always work, but many do. HP split its profitable printer (really ink) business from other enterprise products. Johnson & Johnson split Band-Aids from its drugs and medical devices division. General Electric, albeit late, spun out its healthcare division and recently split aerospace and power generation. The smartest thing eBay has done in 20 years is spin out PayPal. Last week saw stories of potential Intel and Topgolf breakups.

  Should “monopolist” Google dump YouTube? Or its Android smartphone operating system? Or open its data cache to all takers? Maybe, but it shouldn’t be forced to. Google probably should have spun out YouTube to shareholders years ago. Or set up a stand-alone phone company to compete with Apple head to head. Now government bureaucrats might force changes that are almost guaranteed to be wrong, late and damaging to consumers as markets change.

  I know next to nothing about such business strategies. But thanks to the wizards at Fidelity, I'm "heavily" invested in Alphabet, Google's parent. So I'm along for the ride, no matter what happens. And I hope that Google writes its own destiny, instead of having the government write it.

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