Pun Salad

About six years ago, Charlie Kirk brought a Turning Point USA event to the University Near Here. I attended and blogged about it here. I'll excerpt the bit I wrote about Charlie:

And now I'm wondering where that earnest young lady is now, and how she's thinking about what she said, and what Charlie said.

But that's my personal reaction. I've browsed through dozens of others, and I'll just excerpt a couple. First, the WSJ editorialists on The Murder of Charlie Kirk. (WSJ gifted link)

Second, there are wise words from Jonathan Turley. “Prove me Wrong”: Charlie Kirk’s Final Challenge on Free Speech.

And that's all I have to say about that for now, but maybe next week…

In other news:

• I don't care for the President, or the precedent. Jacob Sullum seems worried, too: Trump calls his drone strike on an alleged drug boat 'self-defense.' It looks more like murder.

  Last week, President Donald Trump ordered a drone strike that sank a speedboat in the Caribbean Sea, killing all 11 people on board. Trump described the targets as members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua who were "at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States." Although the men could have been intercepted and arrested, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters, the president decided their summary execution was appropriate as a deterrent to drug trafficking.

  On Wednesday, The New York Times, citing unnamed "American officials familiar with the matter," reported that the boat "appeared to have turned around before the attack started because the people onboard had apparently spotted a military aircraft stalking it." That detail further complicates the already dubious legal and moral rationales for this unprecedented use of the U.S. military to kill criminal suspects.

  The attack "crossed a fundamental line the Department of Defense has been resolutely committed to upholding for many decades—namely, that (except in rare and extreme circumstances not present here) the military must not use lethal force against civilians, even if they are alleged, or even known, to be violating the law," Georgetown law professor Marty Lederman notes in a Just Security essay. Lederman adds that the September 2 drone strike "appears to have violated" the executive order prohibiting assassination and arguably qualifies as murder under federal law and the Uniform Code of Criminal Justice.

  Speaking of precedent, the ACLU was pretty upset 15 years ago, as the Obama Administration Claims Unchecked Authority To Kill Americans Outside Combat Zones

  But Obama had a Nobel Peace Prize already. What does this do to Trump's chances at one?

• An aspiration for us all, I'm sure. But Scott Sumner notes the darned oddness of how we think: Less wrong.

  When driving 5 mph over the 65mph speed limit on Orange County freeways, I notice many motorists passing me. This occurs so often I’ve concluded that most people are “speeders”, that is, in technical violation of the traffic laws. Not surprisingly, society has felt it necessary to create a separate term for people going far over the speed limit—say 125mph. Those are often labeled “reckless drivers”. You might say that speeding 5mph over the limit is less wrong that going 60mph over the limit. The financial penalty is certainly much lower.

  There are many areas, however, where society has decided to extend the same pejorative term over a wider set of infractions. This is usually done to impress upon the public that the relatively milder infraction is also really, really bad. […]

  Here are some terms that have been extended over an increasingly wide range of situations:

  Genocide: Most people believe that genocide in the sense of destroying a culture is less wrong than genocide in the sense of mass murder.

  Segregation: Most people believe that de facto segregation is less wrong than de jure segregation.

  Slave Labor: Most people believe that slave labor in the sense of exploitation of migrant workers is less wrong than chattel slavery.

  And some more examples at the link. Language, when deployed as a rhetorical weapon, is often an imperfect mirror to reality.

• As American as bitching about the New England Patriots. George Will points out that Moaning about foreign competition is a great American tradition. (WaPo gifted link)

  Having seen New England, Kentucky’s Henry Clay (1777-1852) was aghast. The senator’s rhetorical flair, however, failed him. He should have described what nowadays would be called the “carnage” caused by the “Britain shock”:

  “In passing along the highway, one frequently sees large and spacious buildings, with the glass broken out of the windows, the shutters hanging in ruinous disorder, without any appearance of activity, and enveloped in solitary gloom. Upon inquiring what they are, you are almost always informed that they were some cotton or other factory, which their proprietors could no longer keep in motion against the overwhelming pressure of foreign competition.”

  Somehow New England thrived despite the end of whaling, the southward migration of the textile industry, the departure of many shoemakers, and other supposed setbacks. Protectionists, however, persist in imagining recent calamities that they think validate government curtailments of economic freedom. Hence their lingering preoccupation with the “China shock,” the alleged damage done to American industries and communities by imports from China.

  Clay also opined that it was time for the Pats to fire Mike Vrabel.

• I am relatively sure that I've never uttered the word 'decommodify'. Jeff Maurer suggests a certain candidate should avoid it too: Mamdani Won’t Decommodify Housing, and Neither Will Anyone Else. It's a response to an old tweet:

  People often ask what socialists mean when we say we want to "decommodify" housing.
  
  Basically, we want to move away from a situation where most people access housing by purchasing it on the market & toward a situation where the state guarantees high-quality housing to all. (1/8)

  — Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@ZohranKMamdani) December 3, 2020

  I don’t know if this is still Mamdani’s view, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it is. Socialists often talk about “decommodifying” housing; AOC uses the word in headlines of press releases, it pops up all the time in Jacobin, and far left think tanks use it in their research. The basic idea is that housing being a “commodity” — a thing that can be bought and sold — is a problem, because everyone needs housing but not everyone can afford it. The solution, some argue, is to remove housing from market pressures by having the government control the housing market. That would ideally happen through large-scale public housing, though measures like rent control and eviction moratoriums will do until the Glorious Revolution arrives, which it should any day now despite being 177 years behind schedule.

  If I drink a bottle of absinthe, ride a roller coaster, and then immediately stand on my head, I can see what the “decommodify” people are getting at. Housing isn’t like most goods; if a person can’t afford, say, a $100,000 a bottle of wine salvaged from the wreck of a 15th century Spanish galleon, I’m comfortable saying “tough shit”. But that isn’t true with housing. Everyone needs a place to live, so it’s tempting to think that housing should be in a special category removed from the pressures of market forces.

  But when the absinthe wears off and blood starts returning to my brain, I know that you can never remove housing — or any other good — from the pressures of market forces. You can ignore market forces, which inevitably produces outcomes that not many people would call “just”. But the market forces are always there, no matter what, because market forces are not a feature of capitalism; they’re a feature of existence.

  I'm sure Jeff will have something to say about Charlie Kirk, but I won't blog about it for a few days.