Pun Salad

Colleges were once eager to impose speech restrictions to keep their denizens "safe". That was an unmitigated disaster. Thanks to organizations like FIRE, things are improving. "Speech" that colors outside the lines of First Amendment jurisprudence is easy to shut down, otherwise it's a glorious anything-goes.

Twitter can, and should, do the same. It's a no-brainer, Elon.

Briefly noted:

• Bad news from Vero de Rugy: Lame-Duck Congress Want To Spend Like We're Still in a Pandemic.

  Congress' lame-duck session is an ideal time for both parties to pass last-minute legislation while voters are busy Christmas shopping and before members who lost their reelection bids surrender their seats in January. Especially this year, real danger lurks in such legislation. Above all, there's the threat that Congress turns the expanded child tax credit into a new and very costly permanent entitlement. But other threats loom. I'll look at a few of them today.

  A lame-duck session is a great opportunity to push for too much spending on irresponsible pet projects, and more will probably be pushed through this year with little accountability. That's partly because Congress yet again failed to do its basic job of passing a budget by September 30. Instead, legislators kicked the deadline down the calendar to December 16. If they fail again, the federal government will partially shut down. That threat alone makes passing a budget, any budget, a must-do task. Unfortunately, these are precisely the situations that give Congress the opportunity to push through a boatload of otherwise unthinkable deals.

  Unfortunately, voters mostly failed to kick these bozos out in November, so they'll be up to the same mischief next year.

• As if we needed more evidence, here's Jerry Coyne providing: More evidence for the decline of rock/pop music.

  I’ll make a short off-the-top-of-my-head list of some of the music I heard in my youth: the Beatles, the Stones, the Doors, the early Gordon Lightfoot, all the great soul music, including that of Motown (e.g., Sam Cooke, Smokey Robinson, James Brown, The Four Tops, Martha and the Vandellas, Aretha Franklin ad infinitum), Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Jefferson Airplane, Bob Dylan, The Band, Joni Mitchell, Eric Clapton, Joan Baez, the Allman Brothers, Laura Nyro, the Beach Boys.

  Who do the kids have these days? Lizzo and Taylor Swift. It makes me ill to even say that. Will their songs be played on the “oldies” stations in 25 years? Nope; they’ll be playing the music of my youth, simply because it’s the best. There is nobody making rock music today as good as any one of the names I’ve listed above.

  I agree, and science is on our side. One bit of evidence among many:

  A researcher put 15,000 Billboard Hot 100 song lyrics through the well-known Lev-Zimpel-Vogt (LZV1) data compression algorithm, which is good at finding repetitions in data. He found that songs have steadily become more repetitive over the years, and that song lyrics from today compress 22% better on average than less repetitive song lyrics from the 1960s. The most repetitive year in song lyrics was 2014 in this study.

  And (damn) that means that things have gotten worse since 1968's "Yummy Yummy Yummy" by the Ohio Express.

I was going to use that cliché about how Sharyl Attkisson "writes more in sorrow than in anger". But I have to admit the possibility that there's quite a lot on the "anger" side of her scale.

She argues that in recent years there's been a significant shift in journalistic practice, from reporting "just the facts, ma'am" to "supporting a narrative". And that narrative is pretty simple, although playing out on different spectra: anti-Republican; anti-conservative; anti-business. And especially anti-Trump.

Some of this is personal; Attkisson tells the story of her work at CBS, where her reportage was increasingly spiked because—she claims, pretty convincingly—it didn't fit with the narrative of the moment. Eventually she demanded to be released from her contract, and after some legal wrangling, she was. (She currently hosts "Full Measure", appearing on TV stations affiliated with the Sinclair Broadcast Group, also streaming at a computer near you.)

But she doesn't restrict her fire to CBS; the entire array of "lamestream media" is in her sights. Especially CNN and the New York Times, but there's plenty of ammo left over for ABC, NBC, the Washington Post, … A long (somewhat tedious) appendix details the "Major Media Mistakes in the Era of Trump, August 2016-June 2020". hat list is meant I think to parry the lists of Trump's misstatements/whoppers/lies elsewhere; There's an online, updated version here. Not all items refer to Trump, but many do.

Attkisson does a pretty good job of demonstrating the perils, corruption, and inherent insidious aims of "narrative" journalism. Instead of simply telling us what happened, it tells us what to think about their carefully curated facts. And, see above, those "facts" are selected by the appropriate narrative, and may not be reported fairly or even accurately.

This won't be news to many. Attkisson was pushing on an open door in my case. One downside to her presentation: when discussing the media's dreadful unfairness to Trump, she soft-pedals Trump's manifest flaws: his narcissism and his reality-challenged statements. That doesn't excuse the media's behavior, of course, but it makes a lot of it understandable. At a certain point, you just assume the guy is lying.

And I think she's somewhat off base in presenting this media behavior as new. There's Herbert Matthews' coverage of Castro's revolution, Edward R. Murrows' pontifications on Joe McCarthy; Walter Duranty's sycophantic coverage of the Soviet Union under Stalin. This stuff has been happening as long as there have been journalists.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you "The Flannery O'Connor Flowchart" from page 13:

You get the idea. This book is a compendium of advice on how to improve your writing, in order that people like the author, Benjamin Dreyer, won't have to wince and fix it before publication. He is currently "vice president, executive managing editor and copy chief, of Random House," but he started out as a proofreader/copy editor, and he knows his stuff. And he's sharing his accumulated suggestions/demands with a great deal of humor and insight.

Example (page 65):

Go light on the exclamation points. When overused, they're bossy, hectoring, and, ultimately, wearying. Some writers recommend that you should use no more than a dozen exclamation points per book; others insist that you should use no more than a dozen exclamation points in a lifetime.

And you red-blooded Americans will want to peruse the section starting on page 77: "How Not To Write Like a Brit".

If you write anything, you'll probably benefit from Dreyer's guidance. Even if your literary output is confined to your yearly one-page Christmas letter. And you'll have a lot of fun and pick up odd and interesting facts along the way. (What's "the rhetorical trick of referring to something by denying that you're referring to it"? That would be "apophasis".)

Dreyer's general good humor is only occasionally marred by gratuitous political shots. (OK, Ben, we get it: you're a Democrat.) They are easy to forgive, after an eye-roll. (Um, should I have hyphenated that?)

Random Observation 1: The humor extends to the book cover. Did you notice?

Random Observation 2: I have never seen an "Acknowledgments" section so long and detailed. Eight pages. Dreyer's very grateful to (roughly) every one he's ever met. I don't think my name's in there, but I could of have missed it.

Random Observation 3: Dreyer's section on lay/lie/laid/etc. is exhaustive and exhausting. You think you know the rules? Don't be so sure about that.

Irrelevant observation: when I grabbed this off the shelf at the Portsmouth Public Library, I noticed they had tons of tomes with roughly the same Dewey Decimal numbers. There must be a lot of aspiring or actual writers among the PPL clientele, demanding tutelage.