Pun Salad

Your ballot, explained. pic.twitter.com/cmsqS3ZoYD

— Jeff Maurer (@JeffMightBWrong) October 24, 2024

Click over for the full-size complete version. I laughed, which means you will too.

Also of note:

• The other F-word. Ann Althouse knows how to grab my attention. Twice this morning, see below. But here's the first grab: Everyone's talking about whether Trump meets "the definition of a fascist," after John Kelly "read aloud a definition of fascism that he had found online."

  I saw that Kamala Harris, doing a town hall on CNN last night, "agreed" that Trump meets "the definition of a fascist," but she did not, herself, define "fascist," so I wondered what she was doing, embracing a conclusion, calling names. I live in a city where you can get called a "fascist" for venturing that Justice Scalia wrote a well-reasoned opinion. Among left-wingers, the definition of "fascist" is: right-wing. It's a shibboleth. To call someone a "fascist" is to identify yourself as on the left.

  That's pretty good, even if you're hazy on exactly what a shibboleth is.

  I will deploy my usual snip from George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language"

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

  But the last time I ranted about this, I mentioned another Orwell (very short) essay, "What is Fascism?". (Hosted at 'orwell.ru', so who knows how long that will last?) Some relevant paragraphs:

  It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

  Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

  But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.

  You have to admit: there are words there that could apply to Trump.

• You thought the pandering was over? Oh, dear, no. The NR editors consider the latest: The October Bribe.

  If you can’t beat ’em, bribe ’em. With fewer than two weeks to go in the 2024 presidential election, and just three months left of Joe Biden’s presidency, the Biden-Harris administration has announced yet another round of student-loan “forgiveness.” Last week, the White House divulged that $4.5 billion of loans taken out by public-sector workers would be paid for by taxpayers. This week, the White House granted yet another six-month repayment freeze for up to 8 million borrowers. In total, the Biden-Harris administration has now spent $175 billion transferring or delaying student debt. Had the federal courts not stopped their other schemes, that number would have been on course to hit half a trillion.

  That the administration is cramming in one final jubilee is of a piece with how it has approached this project from the start. Understanding that Congress would never have consented to spend that much public money in this manner, the White House has sought at every point to ensure that its conduct was excluded from the customary constitutional processes. It has rewritten unrelated statutes on the fly, declared its actions to be unreviewable in the courts, gamed the rulemaking process to serve its own ends, and, now, attempted to bind its successor to its will. After his initial plan was struck down by the Supreme Court, Biden announced that he would find another way of achieving the same end, whatever it took. He has done so, separation of powers be damned.

  Evading Congress and the courts to arrogate power in the executive? Sounds pretty f**cist!

• None dare call it book-banning. At the Free Press, Francesca Block describes the latest effort to consign a book to the Memory Hole: Ad for Israel Book Canceled Because ‘Customers Might Complain’.

  A prominent trade publication refused to advertise a new book because it feared the word Israel in its title might upset its audience, The Free Press has learned.

  This month Melanie Notkin, an author and communications consultant, tried to place an advertisement for Bernard-Henri Lévy’s new book, Israel Alone, in Shelf Awareness, a trade publication for publishing professionals including booksellers and librarians. The book, published in the U.S. last month by Post Hill Press imprint Wicked Son, is about Lévy’s experiences in Israel post–October 7, 2023.

  On October 9, a representative from Shelf Awareness told Notkin her ad was approved for the price of $2,300, and would run on November 1 in its weekly newsletter, which is sent to more than 600,000 readers.

  But two days later, Matt Baldacci, the publisher for Shelf Awareness, emailed Notkin to tell her the magazine was “canceling” it. When Notkin asked why, Baldacci agreed to speak to her over the phone that same day.

  In audio of that phone call exclusively obtained by The Free Press, Baldacci told Notkin the ad was rejected because the book would cause too much controversy. “Why did we cancel the ad?” Baldacci said to Notkin. “We have a responsibility to our 250 independent bookstore partners, and it’s our feeling that running that ad in their publications, for some of those partners, is going to cause them trouble that they haven’t asked for and don’t wish to have.”

  I think I'll ask the Portsmouth Public Library to get this.

• There's a local angle… in Jonah Goldberg's recent G-File, titled: Down From Libertarianism. Generally, it's about "the narcissism of small differences"; inter-ideological spats can be pretty nasty, no matter if you're talking about conservatives, progressives, liberal, or…

  As I said, there are many, many, rooms in the mansion of libertarianism. This intellectual diversity is uniquely interesting because many libertarians deny this, claiming that libertarianism is a clear and perfectly consistent philosophy. In 2001 I got into a spat with Harry Browne, the 2000 Libertarian Party presidential candidate, on this very point. Browne argued that libertarians are “consistently on one side on every issue,” which is a weird thing to say for someone who spent so much time with libertarians.

  There are left-libertarians and right-libertarians. There are libertarians who call themselves conservatives and there are conservatives who call themselves libertarians. The gang at Reason is not the same kind of libertarian crowd as the one at the Mises Institute. Even among the subgroups there are divisions. I guarantee that the good folks at Cato have arguments in the lunchroom from time to time. Many people think Randians are libertarians, but Ayn Rand emphatically didn’t—and even if many Randians identify as libertarian, their leaders often take after their founding mother and score poorly on “Plays well with others.” And Friedrich Hayek, often considered the patron saint of libertarianism, did not call himself one (he was a lovable “Old Whig”). Meanwhile, the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire is a dumpster fire that, from what I can tell, no decent libertarian wants to be associated with. Its Twitter account recently posted, “Anyone who murders Kamala Harris would be an American hero.” Hell, there’s been a decades-long simmering libertarian civil war over … the Civil War.

  I've bolded the local angle, and I was bold enough to comment:

  As a mostly-libertarian New Hampshire resident, I consider this insulting to dumpster fires. At least dumpster fires eventually go out.

  (I also find myself saying "SMALL L" in front of "libertarian" louder and louder these days.)

  Anyway, Goldberg's essay makes some good points.

• This is Pun Salad, so… Ann Altouse's second attention-calling post: "State media has... suggested the new campaign intends to target even benign-sounding puns". And that state is (surprise!) not California, but China. She points to a Guardian article about it: China cracks down on ‘uncivilised’ online puns used to discuss sensitive topics.

  State media has also suggested the new campaign intends to target even benign-sounding puns, giving as an example the phrase “rainy girl without melons” (yǔ nǚ wú guā) which is often used in place of “it’s none of your business” (yǔ nǐ wú guan).

  The People’s Daily noted the quick turnover for online memes, and urged authorities and social media platforms to not allow “obviously ambiguous” new words to spread quickly without “rectification”.

  “A wave of bad jokes will have disappeared, and a new wave of bad jokes may be on the way,” it wrote.

  "None of your business." Anyone ask Tim Walz for a comment?