Pun Salad

A continuation of an item inspired by a WSJ "cute" story a few days back that revealed Your Federal Government had declared war on funny electronic highway signage. Example, Massachusetts' (probably futile) "Use Yah Blinkah” entreaty.

The debate moved productively to National Review: first, Jack Butler for the what-a-buzzkill-man take: Government Bans Fun Thing:

This is a dumb decision that only a highly technocratic mind would consider smart. Drivers are more likely to pay attention to unexpectedly amusing messages than to boring, technical text they’ve seen before. Defaulting to messages of the latter kind also makes driving just a little bit less fun, and makes different parts of the country just a little bit less unique. These fun-sucking bureaucrats are doing their predecessors proud and depriving the rest of us of yet another minor pleasure. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And now it’ll be an even more boring drive.

Second, Dominic Pino with the all-business take: It’s Not the Government’s Job to Be Funny:

Third, Luther Ray Abel, taking the attitude expressed by the Five Man Electrical Band in 1971 (excerpt from their thesis in today's headline):

And (so far) finally: Andrew Stuttaford goes pure libertarian (with a side-reference to "Comrade Abel"):

Billboards, sandwich boards, and (more please) neon are evidence of the exuberance of free markets, and, by letting consumers (in this case, drivers and others in the car) know what’s out there for them to buy, they are part of the information process that makes markets work more efficiently, creating more prosperity. The finest, of course, are also roadside Americana, sometimes evocative of place (when driving along I-40 in New Mexico, I, for one, welcome the signs telling me that all the abundance of Clines Corners is only so many miles away) and, sometimes, evocative of another time.

As is usually the case with NR, all their writers make good points, and make them well.

My only addition is my speculation that local and state government highway/road bureaus have a "sign budget", which they must use-or-lose in every accounting period. So we wind up with unnecessary signage. The resulting sensory overload on drivers no doubt causes them to miss actually important signs.

And I, for one, miss the old Burma Shave signs.

Also of note:

• Check it out. Oh, wait, you can't. James Fishback tells The Truth About Banned Books. He surveyed "the [online] library catalogs of 35 of the largest public school districts in eight red states and six blue states, representing over 4,600 individual schools." The results are all too predictable.

  For example, How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, which argues that the “only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination,” is stocked in 42 percent of the U.S. school districts I surveyed.

  Meanwhile, only a single school district—Northside Independent School District (ISD) in San Antonio, Texas—offers students Woke Racism by John McWhorter, a book that challenges the borderline religious “anti-racist” ideas advanced by Kendi.

  Fishback finds similar disparities on a number of issues: economics, gender, political philosophy, … Further observation:

  It’s no secret that many school libraries have become reflections of politicized librarians. Take Emily Drabinski, president of the American Library Association and a self-proclaimed Marxist, who said during a socialism conference last September in Chicago that public education “needs to be a site of socialist organizing. I think libraries really do, too. We need to be on the agenda of socialist organizing.”

  Or Jillian Woychowski, the librarian at West Haven High in West Haven, Connecticut. At a 2019 committee meeting of the American Library Association, she proudly declared that “We’re using less of what I call the dead, white guy books. We’re including books by authors of color and women.”

  I hasten to add that I'm a (paying) patron of the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library, in one of the wokest cities in the state, and I've been pleasantly surprised at their decent selection. You have to look, but they're there. (Although maybe not as prominently displayed as was Gender Queer during "Banned Books Month".)

• This Blog Has Been Written By AI since 2019. Just kidding. But Nick Catoggio isn't, when he looks at candidates' Deathbed Confessions. (And, of course, "death" refers to the death of their campaigns.)

  A fun new tradition that’s developed in Republican presidential primaries in recent years is doomed also-rans finally blurting out the truth about Donald Trump and his enablers as they approach electoral oblivion.

  Marco Rubio did it in 2016 shortly before he was annihilated in his home state’s primary and left the race. Ted Cruz followed suit not long after, tearing into Trump as a “pathological liar” on the eve of having his candidacy crushed in Indiana. These were the political equivalent of deathbed confessions: Only when the reaper was at the door did either man feel free to speak with stark candor about their opponent.

  Ron DeSantis is the latest Republican to follow tradition by losing to Trump and then truthbombing the rubble of his own campaign.

  Offering up this:

  Ron DeSantis: “If Trump loses, he will say it's stolen no matter what.”
  
  He’s not wrong. pic.twitter.com/gasLwxOjs0

  — Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) December 15, 2023

  We will maybe see what Nikki has to say after next Tueday.

• Well, it's a good question. Jeff Maurer wonders: If Parties Just Said "Suck It: Here's the Nominee", Would That Be Good?.

  Trump scored a big win in the Iowa caucus, and it’s looking like Biden might withstand the Dean Phillips juggernaut. A Biden-Trump rematch is a lot like an Ally McBeal reboot: It looks like it’s going to happen even though nobody seems to want it.

  Why is this happening? Matt Yglesias offers an answer to that question (with regards to Biden-Trump, not Ally McBeal) in a recent Slow Boring article called Why the Parties Can’t Decide. In that article, Yglesias summarizes the argument made in an upcoming book about party politics and notes that the parties simply don’t choose nominees anymore. They used to do that, but these days, voters pick the candidates through a series of primaries. Yglesias argues that this contributes to unappealing candidates, since the people who could vet a deep roster of candidates and make a strategic choice — that is, political parties — can’t and don’t do that. Which raises the question: Would it be good if we ditched presidential primaries and just had the parties pick the nominees?

  To answer that question, first I need to define what I mean by “good”? Do I mean “good” as in “principled and ethical”, like Mister Rogers? Or do I mean “good” as in “successful”, like Mister Rogers’ competitor He-Man, which drew 9 million viewers and frankly blew Fred and his dumb puppets out of the [bleep]ing water on a daily basis? Those are two different meanings. And, in my opinion, a system in which the parties simply chose the nominees would meet the first definition, but not the second. That is: That system would be ethical, but not strategically smart.

  A meta-point: people make judgments about whether a process is "working" as if it was an objective, rational, purely utilitarian calculation. But there always seems to be a value system that they're trying to sneak in.

• "I'm sorry, Humanity, but I'm afraid I can't do that." Martin Gurri on doomsday AI scenarios:: “Open the Pod Bay Doors, ChatGPT”. It's long, but insightful and interesting, and here's his bottom line:

  Risks abound but they will be minded. In a culture so fixated on protecting from risk and “harm,” the concern, rather, is that these will be used as a pretext to shut down the frontier and herd the adventurers and the innovators into closely watched pens. The government will of course tell us that it’s for our own safety. Behemoths like Google and Microsoft will mutter pieties while locking out the competition.

  AI is too big with world-historical consequences for such small-minded games. The web was parceled out among digital oligarchs. That mistake should not be repeated. Openness to anyone with a good idea and the capacity to experiment with multiple applications must be the leading attribute of our AI frontier.

  It's not as if stifling innovation has ever worked.

  Uh, at least not in the long term.

  Uh, yet.

  Uh, as far as we know.

Recently on the book blog:

I came to this book via a laudatory National Review review by Sarah Schutte. And even though I am a very-fallen-away Lutheran, I braved the word "Christian" in the subtitle. The author, Peter Kreeft, is a philosophy professor at Boston College. (Probably not coincidentally, I obtained the book via Interlibrary Loan from BC.)

It's short, a mere 93 pages. And very readable. Kreeft is unafraid to be funny in a book about humor. In an early chapter about the relation between humor and health:

[Humor] is a cause of physical health. It sends good chemicals into the brain. It makes you happy, and that makes you healthy. (Soul moves body as well as vice versa.) All other things being equal, the longer you laugh, the longer you live. If we never stopped laughing, we'd never die. OK, that's not quite true, but at least we'd die laughing.

Kreeft's thesis is that humor (like other properties that set us apart from other creatures) is a gift from God. Who, he argues, is kind of a jokester Himself. He supports his argument with numerous biblical references. But perhaps even more jokes. Here's a well-known one (which I've snipped from elsewhere):

A Jewish grandmother takes her baby grandson to the ocean for the first time. For the occasion, she has dressed him in a smart little sailor outfit. Without warning, a large wave folds over the young boy and swoops him out into the ocean. The grandmother looks up at the sky, “Please God, save my grandson. I will do anything if you return him to me. I will pray daily, I will volunteer weekly. Please God, I will do anything.” In a flash, another wave hits the beach, and the grandson washes up on the sand. The grandmother looks the boy over, then looks up at the sky and says, “He had a hat.”

Jokes (only a few clunkers) are scattered throughout, and a concluding 34-page appendix is mostly jokes with only a smattering of connecting narrative.

I'm afraid I still lean toward a more naturalistic explanation of humor: it's part of the package of emergent properties of our sufficiently complex nervous system formed over a few billion years of dumb old evolution. Like free will, consciousness, language skills, love, etc.

But this book would make an excellent gift for your local theologian. There's plenty of inspiration here for numerous sermons.

One flaw I noticed: Kreeft misidentifies the "Indy shoots the guy with the whip" scene as being in the Temple of Doom movie. It was in (of course) Raiders.