Pun Salad

I've been a fan of Anthony Horowitz's fictional collaboration with ace detective, ex-cop, Daniel Hawthorne since 2020. I've since learned that this series is a variety of metafiction, where the author inserts himself into the story as a character. As I've said before: it's as if Sherlock's companion was not named "John Watson", but "Arthur Conan Doyle". Works for me! (My previous reports on the Horowitz/Hawthorne mysteries: here, here, here, and here.)

This one's different. Horowitz's publisher is demanding that he write the next book in the series, but Hawthorne hasn't been working on any new cases. What to do? After some difficult negotiations, they decide to do a prequel of sorts: a murder Hawthorne worked on before he joined up with Horowitz. Hawthorne will provide Horowitz with the case documents in chronological order, so the book can be written without knowing how it's going to turn out.

The years-ago murder took place in "Riverside Close", a group of six houses containing people living in decent harmony until a new family moves in and proceeds to irk every one of their new neighbors. Tensions rise until, eventually, the main offender gets a crossbow bolt in the throat.

There are too many suspects, and they all seem to be hiding something. Hawthorne and his then-partner, Dudley, interview them all.

And Horowitz, as he learns about the crime in the present, becomes increasingly dismayed at how the past case developed. Is there really a book in all this?

Well, yes there is. You're reading it. Keep turning those pages, Paul….

There's quite a bit to keep track of, but Horowitz lays out everything clearly; that doesn't mean you'll see the plot twists coming. (Well, I didn't. Maybe you will.)

As I ride this train through the Dutch countryside on October 7, all I can think about is the violence that people are willing to object to and the violence those same people are willing to pro-actively support with material and political aid.

— Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (@IBJIYONGI) October 7, 2024

Professor Prescod-Weinstein has trained her brain well. Even on the one-year anniversary of a vile atrocity, she's only thinking about the stuff she's been thinking about for years, and in the same, predictable way. Deploying the same turgid clichés. She has successfully managed to avoid even a shred of self-doubt intrude on her mental processes.

Congratulations are in order, I suppose.

Also of note:

• Reminder: She's a nitwit.

  JUST IN: Kamala Harris has no clue what to say after her teleprompter appears to stop working, keeps repeating herself.
  
  The Vice President kept repeating “32 days.”
  
  “Remember his number 32 today? We got 32 days until the election.”
  
  “So 32 days… 32 days… Okay. We got some… pic.twitter.com/2fIl1nyEkq

  — Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) October 4, 2024

  I almost sympathize with her. I'm pretty bad at extemporaneous speaking, too.

  But, yeah, the actual problem here is the mental white noise that leaks out through her mouth. There's nothing going on between those ears except cavernous echoes of what she just said.

• But enough about the lady brains. Jerry Coyne looks at a couple of bad XY examples, and wonders: What’s going on with Biden and Israel? (and a coda about Trump’s possible mental problems)

  Although Biden (and now Harris) have proclaimed an ironclad commitment to Israel’s well-being, they’re acting very wonky about Israel’s behavior. First they withheld 2000-pound bombs from Israel (you know, the kind that were used on the targeted strike that killed the leader of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah), though the U.S. rations some of these bombs to Israel.

  But now the U.S. is trying to tell Israel how to run a war that is an existential thread to Israel’s existence, for the tiny Jewish nation is fighting on seven fronts at once (Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and the West Bank). But the U.S. has been trying to control how Israel responded to Hamas’s October 7 attack from the very beginning. First Biden told Israel not to invade Gaza. When they did, Biden told Israel not to go into Gaza City. When they did, Biden told Israel not to go into Khan Younis. When they did, Biden told Israel in no uncertain terms not to go into Rafah, for that was “crossing a red line.” Kamala Harris backed up Bided then, asserting that she had “studied the maps.” Israel did go into Rafah and got some hostages, along the way destroying much of Hamas’s military capabilities. All the while Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was waffling, especially about negotiations, for he is the lever Biden uses to try to push Israel in his direction. Had the U.S. followed Biden’s wishes, then, Hamas would still be in control of Gaza, and the dangers of another October 7 would remain.

  OK, a sideways Kamala slam there too. 'Twould be funny except when you remember these are the people who are supposed to be in charge. At a certain point, you'd think they'd readjust their priors and admit that Israel (and Bibi) just might have more incentive to come up with effective survival tactics than people sitting safely in DC, thousands of miles away.

  Oh, I should provide the "coda" to which Jerry refers in his headline. In response to a comment from a reader who is (apparently) a Trump fan:

  This made me laugh, because first of all, it seems likely to me that Trump really is mentally ill, at least with a diagnosable pattern of symptoms that fit into narcissistic personality disorder:

  Although Jerry's armchair psychoanalysis is deplorable… yeah, I'd give pretty good odds he's right.

• 

  Speaking of narcissists, though… Jonathan Turley spots the latest from the bullet we dodged back in 2012 and 2016: “We Lose Total Control”: Clinton Continues Her Censorship Campaign on CNN.

  Hillary Clinton is continuing her global efforts to get countries, including the United States, to crackdown on opposing views. Clinton went on CNN to lament the continued resistance to censorship and to call upon Congress to limit free speech. In pushing her latest book, “Something Lost and Something Gained,” Clinton amplified on her warnings about the dangers of free speech. What is clear is that the gain of greater power for leaders like Clinton would be the loss of free speech for ordinary citizens.

  Clinton heralded the growing anti-free speech movement and noted that “there are people who are championing it, but it’s been a long and difficult road to getting anything done.” She is right, of course. As I discuss in my book, the challenge for anti-free speech champions like Clinton is that it is not easy to convince a free people to give up their freedom.

  That is why figures like Clinton are going “old school” and turning to government or corporations to simply crackdown on citizens. One of the lowest moments came after Elon Musk bought Twitter on a pledge to restore free speech protections, Clinton called upon European officials to force Elon Musk to censor American citizens under the infamous Digital Services Act (DSA). This is a former democratic presidential nominee calling upon Europeans to force the censorship of Americans.

  Unsurprisingly, Portsmouth (NH) Public Library has purchased Hillary's book, but has "banned" Turley's.

• Moan. Phillip W. Magness has some bad news: Marxism is back. (Did it leave? Missed that.)

  Karl Marx’s influence among intellectual elites underwent a massive rebound in recent years. In 2018, mainstream publications including the New York Times, the Economist, and the Financial Times ran gushy homages to the communist philosopher to commemorate the bicentennial of his birth. Marx’s Communist Manifesto consistently ranks as the most frequently assigned book on university course syllabi, with the exception of a few widely used textbooks. Bibliometric evidence of Marx’s prevalence abounds in academic works, where he consistently ranks among the most frequently cited authors in human history. The academy erupted with yet another fanfare for Marx last month, when Princeton University Press released a new translation of his magnum opus, Das Kapital.

  The high level of Marx veneration in modern academic life makes for a strange juxtaposition with the track record of Marx’s ideas. The last century’s experiments in Marxist governance left a trail of economic ruination, starvation, and mass murder. When evaluated on a strictly intellectual level, Marx’s theories have not fared much better than their Soviet, Chinese, Cambodian, Cuban, or Venezuelan implementations. Marx constructed his central economic system on the labour theory of value – an obsolete doctrine that was conclusively debunked by the “marginal revolution” in economics in the 1870s. Capital was also riddled with internal circularities throughout, including its inability to reconcile the pricing of labour as an input of production with labour as a priced value onto itself. By the turn of the 20^th century, Marx’s predictive claims about the immiserating forces of capitalism were confronted with the tangible reality of growing and widening levels of prosperity.

  By every measure of its own merit, Marx’s economic system should have been relegated to the dustbin of intellectual history – and for a brief moment it was. Marx’s Capital struggled to find an audience in his own lifetime. He died in 1883 in relative obscurity and with little following outside of a small band of fanatical leftists led by his friend Friedrich Engels. Even among fellow socialists, Marx was a controversial figure. He spent the last decade of his life locked in endless internecine feuds with anarchists, non-revolutionary socialists, and even other competitor revolutionary factions. For decades after his death, he faced credible accusations of plagiarising his theories from other writers. The Manifesto has more than a few arguments that strongly resembled an 1843 pamphlet by French socialist writer Victor Considerant, and Marx’s doctrine of “surplus value” closely follows an earlier work by democratic socialist thinker Johann Karl Rodbertus.
  

  I was able to re-excavate this P.J. O'Rourke quote from his 1983 book, Modern Manners:

  Another distinctive quality of manners is that they have nothing to do with what you do, only how you do it. For example, Karl Marx was always polite in the British Museum. He was courteous to the staff, never read with his hat on, and didn't make lip farts when he came across passages in Hegel with which he disagreed. Despite the fact that his political exhortations have caused the deaths of millions, he is today more revered than not. On the other hand, John W. Hinckley, Jr., was only rude once, to a retired Hollywood movie actor, and Hinckley will be in a mental institution for the rest of his life.

  He was right about everything except for that last bit.