Pun Salad

An interesting tweet from Paul Graham:

People who think they no longer depend on trusting experts only survive because they're mistaken. Every time you get on a plane you trust experts implicitly about a million questions you're not even aware of.

— Paul Graham (@paulg) September 2, 2025

I don't exactly disagree. And it's more general than trusting experts; we tend to take the wonders of everyday modern life for granted. As wiser people than I have pointed out: for most of homo sapiens timespan, we lived lives that were nasty, brutish and short.

But using "expert" as a bullying thought-terminating cudgel has been on the upswing for a few decades, hasn't it? It can be amusing though: Bill Murray in Ghostbusters: "Back off. man; I'm a scientist."

For another example, David Harsanyi has his tongue embedded deeply in his cheek when he pens An Open Letter to My Esteemed Colleagues at the International Association of Genocide Scholars.

Also on the IAGS beat is Jeff Maurer, a little (OK, a lot) more R-rated than David: Constant Lying About Gaza Makes It Hard to Know What’s Happening in Gaza.

Assume a humanitarian tragedy — this is a pure hypothetical, I’ll talk about how much it applies to Gaza in a minute. Your goal is to alert people to the tragedy. Should you:

A) Relate the facts as you know them, holding yourself to the highest possible standards of honesty and objectivity so that your account is credible. Or…

B) Constantly lie, exaggerate, and misrepresent the situation until no thinking person believes anything you say.

When it comes to Gaza, many people have chosen “B”. Their latest Highly Visible, Credibility-Incinerating Fuckup involves the International Association of Genocide Scholars. If you’re thinking “I’ve never heard of the International Association of Genocide Scholars,” don’t worry — that’s the correct answer. Nobody had heard of the group before Monday, at which point their declaration that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza got reported in The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, PBS, NPR, Reuters, the AP, the BBC, The Guardian, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, and countless other publications. But it seems that not one single person at any of those news organizations bothered to google “What in heavenly fuck is the International Association of Genocide Scholars?”

But someone at The Free Press DID google it, and now there’s a major scandal. Because it turns out that for the very reasonable price of $30, any dickweed can join the International Association of Genocide Scholars. And many-a-dickweed has now done exactly that; in the wake of the Free Press story, people signed up their dog, Cookie Monster, Emperor Palpatine, and Hitler — all of those figures were, for a brief time, International Genocide Scholars. And some of the non-joke scholars were kind of a joke, like activist Nidal Jboor, who recently called the “freedom fighters” of Gaza “heroes”. The Free Press says that 80 of the group’s 500 members are listed as being based in Iraq, which is odd, since nobody has ever called Baghdad “Boston on the Tigris”. The group seems to basically be a bunch of randos who gave themselves a distinguished-sounding name, which reminds me of this Clickhole headline:

So, go ahead and hop on that plane to Chicago, but you might want to make sure your skepticism filters are in place when venturing into the MSM swamp.

Also of note:

• As Tom Wolfe said long ago… "The "dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe." And assuming England is at least geographically near Europe, as Charles C.W. Cooke notes, Wolfe's observation remains true: England’s Arrest of Graham Linehan Was an Act of Calculated Tyranny.

  Here is the first line of a story in today’s Guardian, a British newspaper:

  The writer of TV’s Father Ted has been arrested at Heathrow over three social media posts on transgender issues.

  If you click the link and scroll down, you’ll see that there is more to the piece than that one sentence. But there doesn’t need to be. The whole tale is contained within those 19 words. If you read on, you will find no complicating factors or exculpatory details or sins of omission. The news is exactly as it appears: In England, yesterday afternoon, the police deliberately arrested a man who was flying in from the United States because he had expressed views on Twitter that the British government does not like. England — not North Korea, or Russia, or China. England — the land of John Stuart Mill and Thomas Paine and Monty Python. For tweets on transgender issues. Tweets — not threats of imminent violence, or a credible vow to blow up the airport upon arrival. Tweets — on issues about which people profoundly disagree.

  Also dismayed are Greg Lukianoff and Adam Goldstein: Yes, the UK really is that bad for free speech. Greg and Adam have the tweet (apparently) in question, from back in April:

  

  As should be obvious, this wouldn’t meet the standard for incitement within the U.S.. In the U.S., for something to be incitement, it must be “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” Linehan is talking about a hypothetical future person in a conditional set of circumstances. It’s hard for something to be imminent when we don’t know where, when, or if it will ever occur.

  And we should be skeptical about whether this tweet is “likely to produce” the outcome it suggests. It’s hard to envision a gatekeeping woman in a female-only space saying, “I was going to ignore this person, but then I remembered what the co-creator of Black Books said, so I gave them the Van Damme special.”

  I gotta admit I'd never heard of Graham Linehan before.

Recently on the book blog:

This book, by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber, was one of the recent nominees for the Manhattan Institute's annual Hayek Book Prize. Its Amazon page has blurbs from Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. So I did the University Near Here's Interlibrary Loan service, and—whoa, this is not really what I expected.

It's about bubbles. I had a superficial understanding (and my impression was that it was the standard understanding): bubbles are "irrational exuberance", where investments in a certain good/service skyrocket. Early investors, if they're adroit, get out near the peak and make out like (sometimes literal) bandits. Everyone else sees their positions become worthless, and need to start wearing those barrels held up by suspender straps. Bubbles richly deserve their bad reputation.

Hobart and Huber have a broader concept: bubbles aren't necessarily bad. Sometimes they are world-changers, innovative remedies for stagnation. And we desperately need to break out of our post-1970 stagnation. They note the changeover from a gold standard to fiat money as the prime mover of that, introducing the era of excessive risk aversion, artificially-set interest rates, endless bailouts, etc.

They consider a number of examples of the kind of thing they're talking about: the Manhattan Project; Apollo; Moore's Law; Corporate R&D; fracking; and, finally, Bitcoin. (As in: "Gee, if I'd bought Bitcoins when I first heard about it…") Notable: the co-dependence of various bits of a boom. For example, continuing improvement in computer/networking hardware makes possible to newly-practical applications. Those new applications then drive further hardware innovation. And…

The authors make some dubious historical analysis. Was the "main purpose" of the Manhattan Project (and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) to "subdue the Russians" (page 105)? I'm far from an expert, but what I've read suggests that's a fringe view; we mainly wanted to avoid a bloody invasion of Japan by American troops.

Do ICBMs deliver their payloads "halfway across the globe in fifteen minutes" (page 117)? No, it's more like 45. (That's pretty fast, of course, but it's also pretty easy to get this right.)

Do "doped" semiconductors have "a surplus or deficit of electrons" (page 141)? Not exactly; that would give them a net electric charge. The doping atoms introduced into the semiconductor crystal have a "surplus or deficit" of valence electrons, which allows electrons (or "holes") to meander through the lattice easily and controllably.

Things get kinda weird at the end, with explicit religious allegory. Page 236: "In sum, markets collectivize contagious mimetic desires and suppress their violent discharge. The market achieves a quasi-sacred status in our desacralized culture; it represents a transcendent absolute, irreducible and beyond human understanding and control." Uh, yeah, maybe.

And don't miss the explanation (page 257) how "Bitcoin's founding narrative manages to nod toward every major branch of religion."

I was enticed into checking out Leif Enger's 2001 novel, Peace Like a River, by an article in the September issue of National Review, "What It Means to Be a Man" by Christopher J. Scalia (probably paywalled). It's serious literary fiction, which I usually avoid, but I can't deny the author's skill and the book's power. The pages definitely get turned.

It opens in rural Minnesota of the early 1960s. The narrator is 11-year-old Reuben Land, a good, very observant, kid with a nasty case of asthma. The family is headed by father Jeremiah, a janitor at the local school. (Mom has taken a powder.) There's an older brother, Davy, and a younger sister, the very precocious Swede.

And (oh yeah) Jeremiah performs Jesus-style miracles now and again.

But conflict begins when Jeremiah rescues a young girl from getting raped by a couple of local goons. No miracles necessary, just his broom handle, used to pummel the miscreants. This (unfortunately) leads to the Land family becoming the target of retribution, which (in turn) leads to even more violence, and some serious legal trouble for Davy. Who goes on the lam off to the Badlands of North Dakota. And soon after, Jeremiah, Reuben, and Swede set off after him.

The novel is very dense, filled with (um) "colorful" characters, and (very) unexpected plot twists. And there's also some genuinely funny bits, amidst all the grimness of the main plot.