Pun Salad

You may have heard that Claudine Gay resigned from her post at Harvard. It's a sad day, because (as I've said before) she was a useful and prominent reminder of the intellectual corruption of elite higher education.

But there are plenty of other reminders, so I'm not that sad.

Arnold Kling writes (pre-resignation) on The Claudine Gray Litmus Test. Quoting John Cochrane who notes that Harvard picking her as Prez was no blunder: "…Gay is exactly what Harvard wanted, and a look-alike is exactly what it will get unless it wants something different."

Well, we'll see. As far as its free-speech policies go, it can't help but improve.

In other commentary: Jeff Maurer has Claudine Gay's Letter of Resignation.

Well, not really, the actual letter was far worse. Oliver Wiseman and Bari Weiss, plagiarizing the Dropkick Murphys, observe: Claudine Gay, We Hardly Knew Ye….

I bet you get the reference.

Also of note:

• Do we need a FDA for AI? I bet you've been asking yourself that question. Katherine has your answer: We Absolutely Do Not Need an FDA for AI. Her bottom line:

  One thing is clear: We are not in a Jurassic Park situation. If anything, we are experiencing the opposite of Jeff Goldblum's famous line about scientists who "were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." The most prominent people in AI seem to spend most of their time asking if they should. It's a good question. There's just no reason to think politicians or bureaucrats will do a good job answering it.

  Her article includes this amusing tweet:

  wake up babe, AI faction compass just became more relevant pic.twitter.com/MwYOLedYxV

  — Emmett Shear (@eshear) November 18, 2023

• On the Nikki Gaffewatch… is Jonah Goldberg: Haley’s Civil War Gaffe Shocked Us Because Such Missteps Are Rare.

  Nikki Haley gave a bad answer to an easy question: What caused the Civil War?

  She replied with a word salad on freedom and the role of government while failing to mention the word “slavery” at all.

  We don’t need to dwell on why it was a bad answer. The Civil War is a complicated topic, but the simple truth is it wouldn’t have occurred but for the issue of slavery.

  I think she messed up for three interrelated reasons: She thought the question was a “gotcha” and overthought how to respond; she was relying on muscle memory from her days in South Carolina; and, last, because she was campaigning in New Hampshire—the “Live Free or Die” state—and she was trying to cater to what she thought were the audience’s libertarian tendencies.

  She could have recovered: "Oh, did you say the Civil War? I thought you said Revolutionary War! Yeah, slavery."

• What do Communist millionaires worry about? Damien Fisher has one data point from a local: Hate Crimes Talk Worries Communist Millionaire Funding Anti-Israel Protests.

  A key figure in the New Hampshire anti-Israel protest movement, multi-millionaire Communist James “Fergie” Chambers, says the new focus on hate crimes by federal and state law enforcement has him worried.

  He acknowledged the topic is controversial but doesn’t believe the response is proportional.

  “Yeah, this insane backlash equating us with Nazis, charging our friends with insane stuff for what amounts to vandalism….who knows at this point?” Chambers, who lives in the Granite State, told NHJournal via text.

  But that wasn’t the only thing Chambers has typed up as of late. For example, the avowed opponent of the nation of Israel posted on Facebook last month, “Make Zionists afraid.”

  To recycle a quote we featured just yesterday about Marxists: "Someone for whom no amount of mass murder and tyranny will stop him worshipping the splendour in his head."

• And everyone on this side of the political divide, for that matter. Martin Gurri would like to point out something To [His] Friends Across the Political Divide.

  I can’t avoid talking about Donald Trump but I’m going to make it brief. I know you don’t like him; neither do I. But let’s assume he’s only a politician. He’s not Hitler, Godzilla or the Beast of the Apocalypse—just a guy with a loud mouth and a desperate need for attention. Most Americans think of him that way.

  That's not his main point, I just liked the quote.

Recently on the book blog:

Recently on the movie blog:

Darn, I likes me some Denzel Washington. Especially in his role as the nearly-indestructible Robert McCall.

For reasons unexplained until the very end of the movie, McCall is in Italy, wreaking his brand of "equalization" on a criminal organization with shady ties to terrorism and drug trafficking. Thanks to a small error in judgment, he barely escapes with his life, and needs to spend some recuperation time in a scenic Sicilian village.

Which is unfortunately the target of a different organized crime family, also a very nasty bunch.

It's very violent! I seem to recall that McCall avoided using guns in the first two Equalizer movies. Not so here!

Fun fact: Dakota Fanning plays a resourceful CIA agent with a mysterious relationship to McCall. Twenty years ago she was in Man on Fire with Denzel Washington, when she was about ten years old.

And it occurs to me that if you want to understand that "mysterious relationship", and how it's subtly revealed at the end, you need to remember key characters from The Equalizer and The Equalizer 2. Watch those first, if you haven't.

I added this book to my get-at-library list thanks to its inclusion on the NYT's Best Mystery Novels of 2021 list. Unavailable at Portsmouth Public Library, I used an Interlibrary Loan pick at the University Near Here to get a copy from Brandeis University.

The narrating protagonist is Eve. She's a cocaine-snorting lesbian witch, who sees ghosts, and communicates with a dead friend via text. And, although it was in that "best mysteries" list, there's very little mysterious content here. The friend was a suicide, not a murder faked to look that way. Another friend goes missing, and that worries Eve, but is eventually tracked down unharmed, he just wanted to get away. There's no criminal activity, save for whatever is involved in Los Angeles illicit drug consumption these days.

Honest summary: Eve has a difficult time with relationships, and this book recounts her efforts to sort things out over the space of a few days.

Eve talks about everything. On page 118, a waiter brings her enchiladas, warning her: "Hot plate". And:

When he turned away, I touched the plate with the sides of both of my hands. Whenever a waiter tells me a plate is hot, I have to touch it. I want whatever heat anything is giving off.

Hey, me too! Except I just use one finger, not the sides of my hands. And not for some weird attraction to heat, I just consider what the waiter said to be a dare. Similarly, I watch the blood donation needle go into my arm even after—nay, especially after—the Red Cross phlebotomist tells me that I might not want to.

If you found that last paragraph uninteresting and irrelevant, I don't blame you. And that's the way I felt all through this book, because Eve tells you every single thing that goes through her brain, without regard for relevance or interest.

Eve, and all the other major characters in the book are perpetually on emotional hair-triggers, ready to take offense at each others' actions or remarks. Nobody has a detectable sense of humor. (Although the word "sardonically" appears twice on the back cover description, sorry, that's not the same thing.) Everyone's online, all the time. Except for that missing guy. All in all, the book is not a great advertisement for the Southern California lesbian lifestyle. Eve is not "gay" at all.

But there are a couple explicit lesbian sex scenes. Is that what it takes to get a book banned at Portsmouth Public Library?

So: it's clear that many people like this sort of thing; ratings at Amazon and Goodreads are pretty high. And that NYT reviewer liked it too. But it wasn't my cup of tea.