Pun Salad

Kevin D. Williamson writes Against Nostalgia. (archive.today link)

Double points to KDW for that last link, which goes to one of the funniest SNL sketches ever.

Also of note:

• A myth is as good as a mile. Becket Adams notes the damage When Myths Become Media ‘Facts’. (NR gifted link) A couple examples, among many:

  In 2017, for example, the New York Times claimed that former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin inspired the 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, Ariz. There is no evidence to support this claim. There never has been. Palin later tried to sue the New York Times for defamation. The idea that the former governor incited the shooting originates from the wild speculations of the New York Times’s Paul Krugman, who leveled the accusation just moments after news of the shooting spree first broke. The myth then gradually grew over time until it became a commonly accepted belief in certain social circles. The idea transformed from the unfounded speculation of an angry crank to a generally accepted “truth,” as declared in an official New York Times editorial.

  Another good example of this sort of thing, where a false assertion eventually becomes the accepted prevailing narrative, involves that damned tan suit former President Barack Obama wore in August 2014. It started out as a bit of a joke — the idea that the worst scandal of his presidency was that he wore a tan suit to a press conference. But the joke has since metastasized into something of a sincere talking point. Obama had a scandal-free presidency! He was as clean as a whistle! Why, Republicans were so desperate for a scandal, they pretended as if it was a major crisis that he wore a tan suit! Obama obviously didn’t have a scandal-free presidency. This is a straight falsehood that many now treat as truth.

  I'm old enough to remember Lois Lerner and the IRS.

• I suppose a false choice is better than none, right? Jacob R. Swartz wishes the not-stupid party could be smarter: Democrats offer a false choice between socialism and technocracy.

  The unity that once held the Democratic Party together has given way to ideological meandering, oscillating between "woke" moralistic left-wing populism and technocratic managerialism. These two impulses now define its fractured identity: the former emerging from the Occupy movement and the momentum of Bernie Sanders' presidential campaigns, the latter from the evolution of the Clinton-era "New Democrat" consensus.

  The 2025 elections crystallized the divide through two major victories—socialist outsider Zohran Mamdani in New York City and Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who's more in line with the neoliberal wing. Each has been called the party's "future," though their wins more clearly reveal how ideologically hollow the party's core has become.

  Both models come with glaring weaknesses. Mamdani's democratic socialism—state planning, rent control, punitive taxation, and the belief that "no problem is too large for government to solve"—risks collapsing into familiar 20th-century contradictions. Spanberger's approach, while more viable, offers not innovation but a refined status quo: moderation as technique rather than vision.

  To quote Woody Allen once again: "More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly."

• Nevertheless, some will manage to do the impossible. Megan McArdle finds The signs of educational decline are now impossible to ignore. (WaPo gifted link)

  There has been a lot of that going on recently, most notably in education. Instead of rectifying disparities in preparation and achievement, people decided it would be simpler to adjust the measurements. Parents opposed standardized testing, got their kids disability diagnoses that allowed them extra time on tests and lobbied teachers to change bad grades. Exhausted teachers responded with grade inflation, which also helped conceal that low-income and minority kids weren’t doing as well as their richer and White peers. Progressive educators watered down curriculums, gutted gifted and talented programs, and weakened admissions standards for honors classes and magnet schools. Colleges dropped standardized testing requirements, in part because that made it easier to diversify their student body. None of these things happened everywhere, but they happened in many places, and all of them made it harder to see — or rectify — pandemic-era learning loss.

  The results of this thinking can be seen in a recent report from the University of California at San Diego, which like the rest of the UC system stopped accepting standardized test scores in 2020. In 2024 the school had to redesign its remedial math program to create a class that focused entirely on remediating elementary school and middle school math. In 2025, more than 8 percent of entering students needed that class.

  These are college students who chose to enroll in a major with a math requirement yet struggle to round numbers to the nearest hundred, add or divide fractions, or work with negative numbers.

  Students, parents, teachers, administrators, politicians, …: they've all gotten real good at pointing fingers at each other.

• It's a story, but not the whole story. Dan McLaughlin wants a word with you, PBS poster boy: No, Ken Burns, the United States Is Not an Iroquois Nation. The problem is even worse than that, though; it's what Ken left out:

  While there is time to discuss the Haudenosaunee, there’s no mention of Magna Carta or the Glorious Revolution. No time is given to Locke or Montesquieu, or to the ancient Greek democracies or the Roman Republic, the birth and death of which fixated the Founders (hence, the popularity of Joseph Addison’s 1713 play Cato). There’s nothing on the Mayflower Compact or the 1619 founding of the Virginia House of Burgesses, both made by men who had doubtless not yet heard much if anything about Native Americans in upstate New York. The Founding Fathers are extracted entirely from the context of the English political culture, the Scottish Enlightenment, and the classics.

  You can’t make this mistake by accident. Few people in history have left behind a richer record of what they were thinking than the American Founders. They debated, in closed sessions and open newspapers and pamphlets, the drafting and ratification of 13 new state constitutions (14, counting Vermont’s 1777 constitution as an independent republic), the Articles of Confederation, and the ultimate federal Constitution. James Madison took copious notes at Philadelphia in 1787, which were published after the death of everyone involved.

  I know Locke and Montesquieu were white guys, but… come on.

Recently on the book blog:

Recently on the movie blog:

Pun Son wanted to see Nuremburg! (He's kind of into WWII stuff.) So we trundled down to the Regal Cinemaplex in Newington Sunday night for the 8:15 showing, and … we were the only ones in the theater. The parking log was crowded though, thanks to the new Wicked movie.

Cynical observation: When it comes to actual wickedness, I guess there's not so much interest in movies about that.

It is, pretty clearly, Oscar-bait. I'm not sure how the "Best Actor" nomination will play out. Will both Russell Crowe (who plays Hermann Göring) and Rami Malek (who plays his shrink, Douglas Kelley) get nods? Will they then split the vote, allowing some mere mortal to take home the statuette? I'd say Michael Shannon (playing prosecutor Robert H. Jackson) is a lock for Best Supporting Actor, even though he goes through the movie with a single semi-scowl expression.

Also good: John Slattery as Colonel Burton C. Andrus, commandant of the Nuremburg prison and Leo Woodall, an occasional translator between Kelley and Göring, who's hiding a secret past.

It's very long, just a couple minutes short of 2.5 hours. And, if you want to know why I'm concentrating on the actors, most of that time seems to be those actors talking to each other. I may have nodded off for a bit in the middle.

The movie emphasizes how ordinary Germans (like Göring) got enraptured by the charismatic Hitler. At the end, spoiler alert, Kelley is shown as a depressed drunk, given to loudly, but futilely, warning fellow Americans that it would be a mistake to think It Can't Happen Here. Are we supposed to draw parallels between the Adolph and the Donald? I'd guess that wasn't far from the filmmakers' minds.

Declaring that science is under attack by partisans is a fertile field. Searching Amazon for 'war on science' brings up this book, but also a raft of others. I obtained this volume for free from the Reason Foundation earlier this year, which may give you a hint about its ideological positioning. (Full disclosure about my priors: I'm usually in agreement with that positioning.)

The book is a collection of 32 essays; enough are co-written to bring the author count to (see subtitle) 39. Most are written in academic style, with copious citations, footnotes, etc. (References are not included in the book itself, at least not the hardcover; they are available here.)

What makes this version of the "war on science" different is that the aggressors are often on the inside of "science" itself. We're not talking about a rerun of the Scopes trial. A lead essay by Richard Dawkins draws the historical parallel with Lysenkoism in the bad old Soviet Union; opposing Lysenko's batshit ideas about evolution could be at best career-ending, but often enough, life-ending.

This strikes (literally) close to home. One bad example mentioned in a couple places is Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a (tenured) Associate Professor in the Physics Department of the University Near Here. She is cited for her tendentious argument in her published paper "Making Black Women Scientists under White Empiricism: The Racialization of Epistemology in Physics", which claimed (citations elided):

Yet white empiricism undermines a significant theory of twentieth-century physics: General Relativity. Albert Einstein’s monumental contribution to our empirical understanding of gravity is rooted in the principle of covariance, which is the simple idea that there is no single objective frame of reference that is more objective than any other. All frames of reference, all observers, are equally competent and capable of observing the universal laws that underlie the workings of our physical universe. Yet the number of women in physics remains low, especially those of African descent. The gender imbalance between Black women and Black men is less severe than in many professions, but the disparity remains. Given that Black women must, according to Einstein’s principle of covariance, have an equal claim to objectivity regardless of their simultaneously experiencing intersecting axes of oppression, we can dispense with any suggestion that the low number of Black women in science indicates any lack of validity on their part as observers. It is instead important to examine the way the social forces at work shape Black women’s standpoint as observers—scientists—with a specific interest in how scientific knowledge is dependent on this specific standpoint. As Jarita Holbrook notes, Black students have their capacity for objectivity questioned simply because their standpoint on racism is different from that of white students and scientists who don’t have to experience its consequences.

That article was published in Signs, a publication of the University of Chicago Press. In case you're unconvinced of its absurdity, a lengthy rebuttal came from Alan Sokal, published in the Journal of Controversial Ideas, available here.

The book is wide-ranging, covering issues all over the (campus) map: gender ideology, race-based hiring, diversity statements, "decolonizing" mathematics, and more. And, as sort of a unifying theme, the career-destroying efforts of today's censorious heirs of Lysenko.

A concluding section covers "what is to be done". Pun Salad Hero Steven Pinker is here with some good ideas, and I can also recommend Dorian Abbot, Geophysics prof at the University of Chicago. His article is a hoot, showing that he's retained a healthy sense of humor, despite getting cancelled at MIT back in 2021.