Pun Salad

Robert Graboyes has good metaphorical advice. Don’t Cut the Rattle off the Rattlesnake. He ably puts forth the argument in favor of free speech, touching on many examples and principles Pun Salad has covered over many (many) years, down to recent controversies over Substack Nazis and context-pleading university presidents. Excerpt:

This rates a 10/10 on Pun Salad's ReadTheLWholeThing-ometer. You won't want to miss the front-page NYT story about an incumbent Democrat president deeming his election opponent as a "fascists' tool".

Also of note:

• And if you gaze long enough into an abyss… well, you probably know what happens then. Because, as Jonah Goldberg points out: It’s Nietzsche’s World, You’re Just Living In It. He makes an early interesting point:

  I’m going to try to avoid terms like “existentialism,” “pragmatism,” “nihilism,” “postmodernism,” “structuralism,” “post-structuralism,” “deconstructionism,” etc., for two reasons. First, because they get in the way.

  And, second, because they’re intended to get in the way.

  A lot of philosophical verbiage—particularly for intellectuals who believe that philosophy should be used as a weapon or tool of political engagement—is intended to buy authority unearned by argument. The language used to justify their power also serves to protect their authority to use it. If you don’t know the right terms, you’re not one of us, and therefore you can’t be part of our project and can’t criticize it either. Jargon is both gnosis and shibboleth all at once.

  For snowclone fans, see a very old Language Log post: It's X's world, we just live in it.

• He's talkin' 'bout my g-g-g-generation. Steven Malanga writes on The Retirement Crisis That Wasn’t.

  By now, many retired baby boomers should be pinching pennies, at best, or battling destitution, at worst. For decades, the media and the experts they quoted warned that boomers weren’t saving enough for a comfortable retirement. Thousands of stories expounded on the inadequacy of private-sector retirement plans and of the government policies regulating them. Policymakers urged expanding public welfare programs (usually with higher taxes on the rich) to meet the impending disaster: a massive generation retiring without an adequate safety net. Otherwise, the bleak future for many boomers, one headline predicted, would be “Work, Work, Work and Die.”

  And then, as if someone flipped a switch, the coverage changed dramatically. Now, not a week goes by without some story declaring that retiring baby boomers constitute one of the richest generations in history. Far from being poor, they’re now dubbed “The Luckiest Generation,” sitting on a staggering $78 trillion in assets that even a dour media can’t ignore. As a group, the boomers have become such a wealth juggernaut that they grew $14 trillion richer during the pandemic, even as millions of everyday workers suffered financially from Covid shutdowns. Rather than expanding benefits for boomers, politicians now propose reducing programs like Social Security payments for the most affluent recipients, hoping to preserve funds for future generations who—the media tell us—are facing a retirement crisis.

  Well (he said plaintively) this time it really could be a crisis.

  The good news is: all that boomer wealth has to go somewhere when we croak. My advice would be to be nice to boomers, they might remember you in their will.

• Has Chevron run out of gas? George F. Will describes How the Supreme Court could end the ‘Chevron deference’ foolishness.

  Hyperbole being the default setting in today’s discourse, we are warned that the oral arguments the Supreme Court will hear on Wednesday concern cases that could, some progressive commentators insist, “kneecap” and “take a sledgehammer” to federal agencies. And could end the government’s “capacity to address the most pressing issues of our time.”

  This capacity already seems nonexistent. And the people who say that the doctrine of “Chevron deference,” at issue Wednesday, is indispensable to today’s government are actually saying two things: That today’s government is incompatible with the Constitution. And that enabling the former is more important than respecting the latter.

  The cases involve four small, family-owned herring fishing companies that have been ordered by a federal agency to pay the cost of a regulation the agency has decreed. The agency has ordered their fishing vessels to carry, and pay the cost of, onboard government observers. The cost can be more than $700 a day, reducing the companies’ profits 20 percent. The issue is not whether the policy (it pertains to overfishing) is wise, but whether the agency can properly impose the financial burden, absent explicit statutory authorization.

  Hyperbole, heck: I am all in favor of taking a sledgehammer to the kneecaps of federal agencies. Fingers crossed.

• No jokes, please, we're driving. Coincidentally, the WSJ takes a whimsical look on the latest argument against Chevron deference. Feds to Highway Signs: You Have Two Years to Stop Being Funny.

  U.S. road trippers now commonly cruise down the highway and find corny messages on big electronic-safety billboards that double as dad jokes.

  Massachusetts has urged drivers to “Use Yah Blinkah,” Utah has pointed out that “Driving Basted is for Turkeys” and over the holidays Arizona went with “Use headlights like Rudolph uses his red nose.”

  But for America’s funniest highway sign-writers, there is a slowdown ahead. Many families might enjoy their humor, but Uncle Sam isn’t exactly in on the joke.

  In December, the Federal Highway Administration, an agency within the U.S. Department of Transportation, issued new guidance on traffic-safety messages: Signs should avoid language that uses pop-culture references or humor.

  "How many Federal Highway Administration bureaucrats does it take to change a lightbulb?" "That's not funny!"

• Regulation strikes deep, into your life it will creep. Mitchell Scacchi of the Josiah Bartlett Center looks at some legislative proposals designed to chip away and New Hampshire's Education Freedom Accounts: Regulatory creep is coming for EFAs.

  School choice in New Hampshire has become increasingly popular, with more and more Granite State families accessing Education Tax Credit (ETC) scholarships and Education Freedom Accounts (EFAs) to shop the best learning environments for their children in the state’s growing educational marketplace.

  But as the program becomes more popular, the governmental instinct to impose controls is growing. This year, legislators will consider more than half a dozen bills to layer new regulations on the state’s young EFA program.

  Scacchi lists some bad ones, including a clearly unconstitutional one to prohibit EFA use "at religious schools or for religious education or training."

  They really want to keep kids in the government schools. Last year, the JBC issued a report about New Hampshire trends, which contained the memorable TL;DR paragraph:

  The big picture is that during the first two decades of this century New Hampshire spent 40% more to educate 14% fewer students, and those students wound up doing slightly worse in reading and math.

  I can't help but wish all those new regs will be defeated soundly.