Pun Salad

¹⁵ The way of fools seems right to them,
    but the wise listen to advice.

Pun Salad Proverbial Analysis: True. Although it's kinda meta: Advice about taking advice. What's next? Advice about taking advice about advice?

Anyway, KDW muses on the progressive hellhole that is Portland, Oregon, Beef Supremacy in Portland.

The world is full of stupid and angry people, and most of them live in Portland.

Women’s soccer player Jaelene Hinkle, a defender for the North Carolina Courage, was booed by angry Portland women’s soccer fans—and is there any other kind, really?—during a match against the Portland Thorns, after the local mutawwi learned via an interview with The 700 Club (which still exists!) that Hinkle had passed up an opportunity to play with the U.S. women’s team because she was not comfortable wearing a jersey celebrating (roll call!) Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender/Queer/Questioning (there is some dispute about what the Q stands for; some people insist on LGBTQQ just to cover the bases, but that seems like a lot of Qs, if you ask me) Pride Month.

Funny and insightful all the way through. (Need an explanation of the article's title? You may need to watch, or rewatch, Idiocracy.)

It’s time for us to have yet another one of those great national conversations about oppression and inequality. All Americans, but particularly Feminist Americans, must now stop and ask themselves a pressing question: Under what circumstances is it all right to call Chelsea Clinton a …

Hmmm, this is a family column, so I’m not going to use that word. Let’s just say it’s a four-letter epithet for the nether lady parts, the last three letters of which are U, N and T. But in deference to the families that read this paper — including mine — we’re going to use something nicer. We’re going to say … er … rhyming’s so cliche … oh, heck, let’s just go with “twinkletoes.”

Again with the meta: the most interesting thing in the kerfuffle is the shifting rules and moving goalposts that the tribes use to pardon their perceived allies, while savaging their deplorable enemies. Some bright person called it "Calvinball". Who was it, now>…

Conflating racism and profanity is dangerous. One is a worldview, the other is a word choice. Big difference. https://t.co/yWMVpr8WDX

— Christina Wilkie (@christinawilkie) June 1, 2018

Comments Charlie:

This is Calvinball. Imagine, if you will, that, say, Sean Hannity or Ann Coulter had called, say, Chelsea Clinton a “c***.” In what universe would the word have been dismissed as merely a “word choice,” divorced from any associated “worldview”? In such a circumstance, we’d be told that the word reflected the speaker’s sexism and misogyny; that it indicted his entire political ideology; that it highlighted the depravity of his audience; and so forth. The New York Times would link the comment to “rape culture” and “toxic masculinity.” College professors would explain that it came deep from the wells of American inequality. MSNBC would write an opera, and broadcast it over three days. The word would become a Weltanschauung in ten seconds flat.

It helps if you imagine Charlie saying this in an exasperated British accent.

And check out our Amazon Product du Jour for a quick primer on Calvinball.

It's increasingly fashionable for left wing progressives to view free speech advocates as being defenders of a neoliberal system that favors the fortunate. We are told that "there need to be rules to restrict hate speech". The use of passive voice makes it all seem quite simple.

Less often do progressives say, "The government needs to create and enforce laws against hate speech." Even less often do you hear "Government leaders such as Attorney General Jeff Sessions need to seek out and punish people engaged in hate speech." The Devil is in the details.

Progressives: never hanging around for the unexpected consequences.

One of the books is The Ashtray by Errol Morris. Wow, I did not know this:

The subtitle of Errol Morris’s new book is, “Or the Man Who Denied Reality.” That might suggest a biography of Bohr, but the face on the cover is that of Thomas Kuhn. A renowned documentarian known for his dogged pursuit of truth that got one man off death row, Morris had a short-lived stint as Kuhn’s graduate student at Princeton. The cut-glass ashtray of the title was hurled at Morris’s head by Kuhn in a fit of pique. Morris has never forgiven Kuhn. And the ashtray is the least of it. Morris loathed Kuhn’s relativism and abandonment of reason and evidence, and Kuhn loathed Morris back.

To someone who thought that Kuhn walked on water—hey, it was the 70s—this sounds like it might be a huge guilty pleasure.

The other book reviewed by Maudlin: What is Real? by Adam Becker. Which slays the Bohr/Schrödinger/Heisenberg "Copenhagen Interpretation" of quantum mechanics, notably opposed by Einstein:

But while Einstein won—and would continue to win—all the logical battles, Bohr was decisively winning the propaganda war. The Copenhagen doctrine of the completeness of quantum theory and the inescapability of fundamental chance spread, enforced by Bohr and Heisenberg and the rest of the Copenhagen school. Behind the scenes, the Copenhagenists did not agree with each other, but to the world they presented a unified front. Meanwhile, Einstein and Schrödinger both rejected Bohr, but they also bickered with each other.

This also sound bitchtastic. Both books go on by get-at-the-library list.