Pun Salad

²³ A fool finds pleasure in wicked schemes,
    but a person of understanding delights in wisdom.

I can't argue with that. I would be a fool to argue with that.

The social justice left and the reactionary right have never been at each other's throats more viciously than today. Antifa warriors and alt-right foot soldiers attack each other at rallies, clash on campuses, and see each other as mortal enemies.

But the weird thing is that when it comes to issues, their standard bearers, Bernie Sanders and President Trump, have never been closer together.

Both despise the Koch brothers, for example. Hostile to trade. And wedded to a "system is rigged against the little guy" demagoguery that encourages people to see themselves as pathetic victims. And…

Of course sites like Facebook, Apple, and YouTube are free to ban conspiracy mongers like Alex Jones from their platforms. They have a right to dictate the contours of permissible speech on their sites, and to enforce those standards either dutifully or hypocritically or ideologically or using any method they see fit. No one seriously disputes this.

Then again, Twitter also has a right, as a private entity, to take a stand, and, as the company’s CEO Jack Dorsey explains it, dispassionately allow free exchanges of ideas—even the ugly ones Infowars offers—as long as users don’t break the company’s rules. Yet, here we are, watching a number of journalists—supposed sentinels of free expression—demanding that billionaire CEOs start policing speech that makes them uncomfortable.

As David notes, once they've gotten rid of the "easy targets" like Infowars, they'll move on to others, and those will be more complex.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York is a textbook taqiyya Democrat: She presented herself as a moderate when representing a relatively conservative House district and now, after pronouncing herself “ashamed” of her previously moderate positions on issues such as gun rights, she is doing a pretty good impersonation of a left-wing radical, most recently by calling for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the sister agency to the U.S. Border Patrol charged with overseeing the deportation of illegal aliens, among other duties.

Abolishing ICE is the Democratic cause du jour, part of the party’s current rush to the left. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the self-described socialist who won a Democratic House primary over party-caucus chairman Joe Crowley in New York in June, ran as much against ICE as she did against President Donald Trump and Representative Crowley. A petition in California calls for the abolition of the agency; Representatives Mark Pocan, Pramila Jayapal, and Adriano Espaillat (Democrats of Wisconsin, Washington, and New York, respectively) have introduced legislation to dissolve it; Representative Yvette D. Clarke (a New York Democrat) denounced the agency as “the Gestapo of the United States of America,” and Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo described ICE as a “rogue agency.” Sean McElwee of Data for Progress, an early and tireless advocate of abolishing the agency, wrote in The Nation: “The call to abolish ICE is, above all, a demand for the Democratic party to begin seriously resisting an unbridled white-supremacist surveillance state that it had a hand in creating.”

This is not a position that will appeal to Trump voters. Nor is it particularly responsible or honest.

The denizens of the gentrified Portsmouth and Hanover ‘Class’ (and a few wannabes from Keene) are at it again. These easily offended liberals and their minions are getting uppity over local reactions to a fledgling plan to assuage Granite State White Guilt. New Hampshire is Too Damn White™."

This from people living in places zoned to be unaffordable or inaccessible to those they deem undesirable in private but demand we embrace someplace other than where they live in public. People who are happy to call us racists for pointing out the obvious.

“Diversity for diversity’s sake doesn’t bring us anything.”

Steve brings up a point we've made before: while New Hampshire is officially the freest state in the US…

New Hampshire’s regulatory outlook is not so sunny. Its primary sin is exclusionary zoning. It is generally agreed that the Granite State is one of the four worst states in the country for residential building restrictions. Part of the problem might be the absence of a regulatory taking law. However, the eminent domain law is strong. On labor-market freedom, New Hampshire is below average primarily because of the absence of a right-to-work law and of any exceptions to the workers’ compensation mandate, and it has no state-level minimum wage. A telecom deregulation bill was passed in 2011–12, but the state has not yet adopted statewide video franchising. New Hampshire is above average on occupational freedom solely because the health professions enjoy broad scope of practice; the extent of licensing grew significantly during the 2000s, and the state is now below average on most indicators of licensing extent. Insurance freedom is generally better than average, except for some rate classification prohibitions. The hospital certificate-of-need law was abolished in 2011–12, but only effective in 2016, so we code it as still being in force. Otherwise, the state has steered laudably clear of entry and price regulation. The civil liability system is far above the national average; punitive damages were abolished long ago.

I strongly suspect that we could attract more business and young people (of whatever skin shade) by fixing these issues.