Pun Salad

It's International Talk Like A Pirate Day, so we will (once again) deploy the approprrrrriate picturrrre.

So you can type like a pirate, I guess.

Also of note:

• Speaking of piracy. James Lileks muses at his substack about the usefulness of his Paramount+ subscription.

  Disappointed with myself, yes, because it’s just for Star Trek, and there isn’t even any new Star Trek right now I care about. Discovery was full of children pretending to be Starfleet officers, and I can’t watch the one that’s a cartoon because it’s a cartoon. I’m spending 11 a month not to watch Star Trek I don’t like.

  Couldn't refrain from commenting that Paramount+ also has new episodes of Frasier, starting today. (I assume my fellow Lileks' subscribers won't rake me over the coals for that. A polite bunch.)

  I didn't mention I'm only paying $5.99/month. Am I seeing ads? Don't remember.

• From a different Lileks source. It's his monthly column in print National Review, and I tried to get a gifted link to it but failed. Anyway here's: The Most Romantic Massacre.

  Is Kamala Harris a communist? Oh, if only she were. Imagine the stump speeches.

  “The workers. Of the World. There is a world, and there are workers in it. The work of the world is worker’s work. If we think of this as a series of chains, around the work, a knot, a problem of knots, then workers of the world, untie! UNTIE! You have only your knot to unburden from what keeps us, as a community, moving to the place that is not where we once were. Some say real communism has never been tried. I say to try, we must do, and when we do together, we try in a way much different than trying on our own, in the world.”

  […]

  No, she’s not a communist, but that’s not exactly an inspirational campaign slogan. Still, if you’re going to throw around collectivist talk about seizing patents and using the power of the state to discern the proper price of Cheerios or issuing executive orders to make the Naval Observatory timepieces say that it is, in fact, wine o’clock somewhere, and your dad was a professor of Marxism —

  The title, by the way, refers to Tim Walz's relationship with China; he chose to get married on the 5th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

• Muse away. Kevin Corcoran provides his Musings on the New Alien Movie. Which rapidly turns into his musings on: "why is Hollywood so bad at writing stories about corporations that are believably evil?"

  The story of Alien: Romulus centers around the efforts of the Weyland-Yutani corporation to capture and somehow “harness” the xenomorphs for criminally under-specified reasons. (No, this is not a spoiler – this is the plot of basically every movie in the Alien franchise.) The first Alien vs Predator movie is set in the modern day, whereas the original movies are set hundreds of years in the future. This means that Weyland-Yutani has spent literally centuries attempting this task with a 100% failure rate. The xenomorph is an incredibly dangerous creature that unstoppably murders everyone in the vicinity and reproduces by harvesting humans as hosts, killing them in the process. Every time the company has attempted this project, the end result is “basically everyone dies and pretty much everything gets destroyed.” The company has endured massive costs in lost personnel and lost equipment while getting nothing valuable in exchange, but they never stop attempting the same thing over and over again.

  Yes, this sounds like a bad business plan. Corcoran also discusses Omni Consumer Products (Robocop) amd the Tyrell Corporation (Blade Runner). And briefly mentions the (literally) cartoonish bad guys in the Captain Planet series.

  There's even a Google category; it includes my favorite: MomCorp from Futurama.

• Yes, in many cases. Next Question? Jerry Coyne asks Is Wikipedia distorted by ideology and propaganda?. He excerpts a (mostly paywalled) Free Press article:

  One of the reasons for [Wikipedia's lefty tilt] cuts to the very heart of how Wikipedia works. The encyclopedia is governed by a raft of policies like Wikipedia:Notability (subjects of articles should meet a threshold of notability), Wikipedia:Recentism (overdue emphasis must not be placed on recent events), and Wikipedia:Neutral Point of View (self-explanatory). None, however, play even close to the outsize role that Wikipedia:Verifiability plays, with its insistence that claims “must be attributable to reliable, published sources.” The obvious question this standard raises is which sources are considered reliable. While some Wikipedia policies invite ambiguity, on this the site is clear. The Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources page filters media sources into categories of “Generally reliable,” coded in a green-filled cell on the page’s table, yellow for those on which there is “No consensus,” and red for “Generally unreliable.”

  The breakdown of sites filtered into each respective category is telling. The cadre of news outlets that collectively make up the mainstream media—ABC, CBS, and NBC News, Associated Press, Vanity Fair, Vogue, The Atlantic, Axios, BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Wired, CNN, AFP—are classified green for reliable. Strongly left-leaning outlets like Vox, Mother Jones, The Guardian, HuffPost, and The Intercept are as well. But so are outright leftist or socialist outlets, including Jacobin, The Nation, and The Independent, as is civil rights advocacy NGO Southern Poverty Law Center.

  Conservative outlets like Fox News (on politics and science), The Federalist, The Post Millennial, and The Washington Free Beacon are red for generally unreliable. A lower ring of “deprecated sources,” whose use is outright prohibited, includes the Daily Mail, The Daily Caller, The Sun, NewsMax, and The Epoch Times. The Weekly Standard and The Wall Street Journal (the latter of whose news pages are known for tilting more leftward than its right-of-center opinion page) are the only American conservative outlets with a green rating. Right-leaning tabloid New York Post is red; left-leaning tabloid New York Daily News is green.

  While conservative American media is almost uniformly red, the same cannot be said of foreign outlets with dubious agendas. State-owned networks China Daily and Xinhua—whose purpose is to spread Chinese government propaganda to the English-speaking world—get a yellow for “no consensus.” Al Jazeera, owned by Qatar, an authoritarian state, is blessed with a green reliability rating.

  Jimmy Wales is doing a begathon again, I noticed. Sorry, Jimmy, not one dime.

• Can I make the "l" in "small-l libertarian" any smaller? Just picking a source at random, here's the New Republic story: Local Libertarian Party Doubles Down After Violent Harris Threat. And by "local" they mean local to me:

  On Sunday, before the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire celebrated the prospect of political violence against Vice President Kamala Harris.

  “Anyone who murders Kamala Harris would be an American hero,” the party wrote on X, before receiving swift backlash and deleting the post. Later that day, the party published a follow-up, announcing that it “deleted a tweet because we don’t want to break the terms of this website we agreed to” and claiming that libertarians are “the most oppressed minority.”

  On Tuesday, the account released a lengthier additional follow-up, insisting that the original tweet did not call for Harris’s assassination but “merely acknowledg[ed] how some members would react to one.”

  But the newest post somehow made things worse, referring to historical instances of violence that were supposedly “necessary to advance or protect freedom,” including the assassination of “past tyrants like Abraham Lincoln.” Further, it stated that “it’s good when authoritarians” (that is, “progressives, socialists, and democrats”) are made to “feel unsafe or uncomfortable,” which the account’s provocative posts “are frequently explicitly intended” to do.

  On Sunday, Libertarian Party presidential candidate Chase Oliver condemned the post as “abhorrent.” The Libertarian Party of New Hampshire replied by calling him a homophobic slur.

  They cite a tweet from a NYT writer:

  Like if the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire were a CIA plot to destroy the Libertarian Party writ large what would they be doing differently

  — Jane Coaston 🏔️ (@janecoaston) September 15, 2024

  Glad these guys don't have my name and address.

Recently on the movie blog:

While meandering around Roku screens, I noticed this movie from my youth. Famous at the time (at least in my circles) for its irreverent Brit humor from Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. And I kind of liked looking at Eleanor Bron, who I loved from the Beatles movie Help!.

Consumer notes: It's available on the "Plex" streaming service, with ads. Lots and lots of robo-placed ads. And (worse) a significant fraction of them were Kamala ads. No movie subtitles, which is a shame due to the limey accents, occasional mumbling and fast-talking. Ah, well.

Mr. Moore plays Stanley, a schlub short order cook, infatuated with waitress Margaret (Ms. Bron). Thinking it hopeless, he flubs a suicide attempt, which causes a visit from Satan (Mr. Cook). And what follows is your standard Mephistophelean deal: the Devil gets Stanley's soul, Stanley gets Margaret.

Ah, but Beelzebub is a trickster, and Stanley (due to his love-addled stupidity) finds himself in all sorts of unacceptable (but hilarious) relationships with Margaret. And Old Nick has his own motives: getting Stanley's soul will allow him to get back together with God in Heaven, a status he misses.

And Raquel Welch has a small role as one of the Deadly Sins. Guess which one?