Pun Salad

As reported by the NYT: With Truce in Place, Hamas Pursues Bloody Crackdown on Rivals in Gaza (NYT gifted link)

If Hamas can't shoot Jews any more, they'll look around to find others to shoot. It's what they know, it's what they do.

Also of note:

• It's all over now, Baby Blue. Megan McArdle reports that The sweetheart deal is over for academia. (WaPo gifted link)

  As the Trump administration’s war on universities settles into its entrenched phase, it’s given new urgency to a long-simmering debate about whether, and how, academia should pursue viewpoint diversity. This conversation has been happening for decades, mostly between conservatives who want more of it and an academic establishment that wants to leave well enough alone. Now, that conversation has become existential.

  The argument for viewpoint diversity, which this column has made many times, was pithily summarized by physicist Richard Feynman in Caltech’s 1974 commencement address: “The first principle [of science] is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.” Humans are experts at seeing what we expect to see, especially when we really really want something to be true, so it takes strenuous effort — and, often, an outsider with a different viewpoint — to keep us from making fools of ourselves.

  I’ve spent less time writing about rebuttals to viewpoint diversity, such as “Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity” just published by Lisa Siraganian in Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors. To sum up those theses very, very briefly, she sees claims of ideological bias in academia as unproven, and arguments for viewpoint diversity as weak, bad-faith, and inimical to the search for truth and academic self-governance.

  Or as the headline of her companion essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education put it: “Viewpoint Diversity Is a MAGA Plot.”

  Viewpoint diversity in academia scares the crap out of some people.

• Who's next, Greta Thunberg? Ted Nordhaus admits: I Thought Climate Change Would End the World. I Was Wrong. Good for him. Let's skip down a bit:

  Why do so many smart people—scientists, engineers, lawyers, and public policy experts, all of whom will tell you that they “believe in science”—get the science of climate risk so badly wrong?

  The first reason is that highly educated people with high levels of science literacy are no less likely to get basic scientific issues wrong than anyone else when the facts conflict with their social identities and ideological commitments. Yale Law professor Dan Kahan has shown that people who are highly concerned about climate change actually have less accurate views about climate change overall than climate skeptics, and that this remains true even among partisans with high levels of education and general science literacy. Elsewhere, Kahan and others have demonstrated that on many issues, highly educated people are often more likely to hold stubbornly onto erroneous beliefs because they are adept at rationalizing their ideological commitments.

  The second reason is that there are strong incentives to overestimate climate risk if you make a living doing left-of-center climate and energy policy. The capture of Democratic and progressive politics by environmentalism over the last generation has been close to total. Meanwhile, the climate movement has effectively conflated consensus science about the reality and anthropogenic origins of climate change with catastrophist claims about climate risk, for which there is no consensus whatsoever.

  Whether you are an academic researcher, a think-tank policy wonk, a program officer at an environmental or liberal philanthropy, or a Democratic congressional staffer, there is simply no incentive to challenge the central notion that climate change is an existential threat to the human future. And so everyone falls in line.

  Finally, there is a widespread belief that one can’t make a strong case for clean energy and technological innovation absent the catastrophic specter of climate change. This view ignores the entire history of modern energy innovation. Over the last two centuries, the world has moved inexorably from dirtier and more carbon-intensive technologies to cleaner ones. Burning coal, despite its significant environmental impacts, is cleaner than burning wood and dung. Burning gas is cleaner than coal. And, of course, producing energy with wind, solar, and nuclear is cleaner than doing so with fossil fuels.

  Your move, Greta.

• Well, here's hoping. The Dispatch headline from David M. Drucker sounds alarming: Lawsuit Could Upend Campaign Finance Law.

  I'd recommend instead: "Lawsuit Could Improve First Amendment Protections for Political Speech". But that's me.

  A lawsuit winding its way through federal courts could upend decades of campaign finance law and candidate fundraising strategy. Tax-exempt issue-advocacy organizations, shielded from publicizing their donors, could be empowered to substantially increase participation in traditional electioneering.

  The plaintiff in Freedom Path Inc. v. Internal Revenue Service is arguing that federal limitations on political activity placed on 501(c)4 organizations are unconstitutional. Under current law, such groups must devote a healthy majority of their efforts to issue-advocacy but are permitted to engage in some electioneering, such as airing campaign-style advertising and canvassing voters. Like super PACs, these groups can accept unlimited contributions and are typically funded by wealthy donors. Unlike super PACs, their donors can be kept secret from the public.

  Yeah, I don't care much about wealthy anonymous donors. They can spend billions on political ads. So what? Will those ads be more convincing to Joe Voter than the ones he already sees? Why would you think so?