Pun Salad

Another entry on the "wish I had liked it better" list, which is pretty long this year. I was tempted to grab the Kindle edition thanks to Iona Italia's long review at Quillette a couple months back. I think I should have read her review more critically before I sent my $10.49 off to Amazon.

The author, Derren Brown, is apparently very famous in England.

It's long, 491 pages of main text in the print version. Affer a pretty decent beginning, I found it a slog, I kept finding things to do other than reading it. Putting it off until bedtime reading, and pretty much immediately dozing off.

But that's me. You could like it better. Most of the reviews I've seen are very complimentary.

Things start off well, with a debunking of a couple flavors of popular self-help nostrums. And there's a whirlwind tour of the past 2000 years or so of philosophy and psychology, concentrating on stoicism, the philosophy closest to Brown's heart. (He has some minor criticisms later in the book.)

But most of the book is a rambling, not particularly coherent, self-help text, full of Brown's advice on how to pursue happiness. Near the end, Brown lays out five numbered bits of advice, one paragraph each. I'll just quote the first sentence of each:

1. If you have something to "come out" about, come out.
2. You'll never regret falling in love.
3. If you work in a creative field, and you are faced with a choice of doing a job for the money or doing a job for the fun of it, take the fun one whenever you can.
4. Don't be a dick.
5. Look at what takes up your time and see what is worth doing and what is not.

Fine. I might have found these bromides insightful when I was (say) sixteen in Omaha. Now they just seem like clichés, sorry.

Brown devotes an entire chapter to issues of fame. about 40 print pages. Mostly, whether to pursue it; it's not all it's cracked up to be. But also how to deal with fame once you attain it. Might be useful to the 0.01% of the population in that boat.

On page 443, part of his (very) long musings about death:

Dying (and taxes, according to Woody Allen) is something we all must face.

Um. I know he's a Brit, but has Brown never heard of Ben Franklin? And, according to Wikipedia, this observation wasn't even original with Ben! But a decent editing job would have caught the misattribution. Also would have caught the misuse of "begs the question" on page 214.

Some months back, I reported on the books The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America by Jeffrey Rosen and America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It by C. Bradley Thompson. Both very good, but they left me … apprehensive I guess is the best word. Both books did an excellent job of describing the political philosophies of America's founding fathers and the pamphleteers of the day. What was most impressive was the depth of knowledge involved. The Founding Fathers, especially, were steeped in the works of ancient Greeks and Romans.

And it's really hard to imagine any politico of our day with anywhere near that knowledge. Frankly, I wonder if Donald Trump or Kamala Harris read serious books at all. Did anyone ask them during the campaign?

About the only recent pols I can imagine with comparable depth: Mitch Daniels, Ben Sasse, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, … and now I'm coming up empty.

And Sasse and Daniels are no longer in politics, Moynihan's no longer with us. Sigh.

I can imagine the thoughts of the Founding Fathers as they look at you and me in Michael Ramirez's cartoon: We pledged our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. And these are the bozos you've chosen to lead you?

Also of note:

• And abortion is their sacrament. William McGurn notes that instead of political philosophies, we got religions these days. He concentrates on one side, though: The Democrats’ Religion. I'll just excerpt one major article of faith:

  Even on economics a quasi-religious view holds. In this view, policy is a struggle between good and evil. So if there is inflation, it isn’t because of any government spending or policies but because the evildoers are “price gouging.” This is also why, more than four decades after Reagan was first elected, no one has ever specified a percentage for the fair share of taxes the villainous wealthy ought to pay. In economic theology, “fair share” always means “more.”

  … an observation I've made (somewhat tiresomely, I'm sure) many times here at Pun Salad.

• Just five? Michael R. Strain limits himself to rattling off Five Reasons Harris Lost. And here is number one:

  First, macroeconomic management. High consumer prices were a huge drag on support for President Biden. Voters correctly blamed Mr. Biden’s policies for materially contributing to inflation. Of course, we still would have experienced some inflation without the president’s policies. But his policies made it materially worse.

  The lesson for Democratic policymakers: Don’t enact policies that are as reckless and irresponsible as the American Rescue Plan of 2021. It is quite plausible that Ms. Harris would today be president-elect if inflation had peaked at six percent rather than nine percent.

  Click over for reasons 2-5.

• So let's ban the playing of "Friday I'm in Love". Oh, wait. That's not what Jeff Maurer is talking about: Some Democrats Think the Disease is the Cure.

  Working class voters are moving towards the GOP. Democrats are the Frasier Crane party, and Republicans are the party of Homer Simpson. This is bad for Democrats because Frasier Crane-types are small in number, and also because Frasier is a hit character because “life kicks pompous windbag in the nuts” is a classic comedy bit. We’re in our fifth decade of laughing at Frasier Crane’s version of that bit, so Democrats shouldn’t assume that people will tire of seeing uppity blowhards get their comeuppance anytime soon.

  How can Democrats appeal to working class voters? There are two schools of thought. The first is that the problem is that Democrats are culturally out-of-step, and we’ll do better if and when we stop acting like America’s HR department — I’m firmly in this camp. The second is that Democrats have abandoned the economic interests of the working class; this view has been expressed by folks like Bernie Sanders and Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who just had a tweet thread on this topic go viral. I have to say: The economic argument is moving. It’s a heart-wrenching tale of honest folks done wrong — it’s basically a Bruce Springsteen song come to life. And the only quibble I have is that it is completely and demonstrably false.

  Jeff (I call him Jeff) is also brutal on the musings of Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, specifically:

  2/ The left has never fully grappled with the wreckage of fifty years of neoliberalism, which has left legions of Americans adrift as local places are hollowed out, rapacious profit seeking cannibalizes the common good, and unchecked new technology separates and isolates us.

  — Chris Murphy 🟧 (@ChrisMurphyCT) November 10, 2024

  Jeff's bottom line:

  What’s killing the Democratic Party isn’t a lack of concern for the working man — it’s adherence to coture ideologies that toss around faux-intellectual buzzwords like “neoliberalism”.

  Since I'm not a Democrat, I hope that Democrats don't take Jeff's advice.

• Don't let the screen door hit you where the good Lord split you. At City Journal, Corbin K. Barthold bids Farewell to a Norm-Buster.

  Right after Lina Khan was confirmed to a seat on the Federal Trade Commission, the Biden administration announced that (surprise!) she would chair the agency. This bait-and-switch was a shameless breaking of norms—and a sign of things to come. Khan wanted to shake things up. Not unlike one of her Big Tech nemeses, Mark Zuckerberg, she wanted to move fast and break things. And that’s what she did. But her time is up. Now that her tenure as chair is about to end, we can start assessing the wreckage. How much damage has Khan done? Fortunately, less than you might think.

  The simple truth is that Khan wasn’t very good at her job. She broke things that she needed. She could and should have viewed the FTC’s career attorneys—most of them, presumably, Biden voters—as allies in her quest for more aggressive antitrust enforcement. But as FTC veterans Howard Beales and Timothy Muris write, “the new Chair’s relationship with the career staff began with a series of insults.” Khan stood by President Biden’s side as he maligned their work. She ordered them to cancel all public speaking engagements. She elevated individuals from the office of outgoing commissioner Rohit Chopra—who approached the agency and its personnel with immense disdain—into key positions. At meetings, she reportedly criticized the agency in fulsome terms. Khan treated staff as “part of the problem.” Morale cratered, and many experienced employees rushed for the exits.

  I thought she did a lousy job too, but (I confess) I didn't even know about some of the stuff Barthold describes.

  The (further) good news is that, as populist as Trump is, he probably could not find anyone comparable to Khan.

• Bullet dodged. Shameless Democrat hypocrisy will be underreported in the MSM, but Eric Boehm will point it out at Reason: Democrats Are About To Rediscover the Value of the Filibuster.

  Three years ago, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D–Wash.) and nearly 100 of her House colleagues signed a letter urging top Democrats in the Senate to take radical action.

  "This is an existential moment for our country," Jayapal and the other House Democrats wrote. "We cannot let a procedural tool that can be abolished stand in the way of justice, prosperity, and equity."

  But that "existential moment" was then, this is now:

  Asked Tuesday whether she would still support ending the filibuster in this new political dynamic, Jayapal gave the obvious answer in a bit of an unexpected way.

  "Am I championing getting rid of the filibuster now when the [GOP] has the trifecta? No," Jayapal said, according to HuffPost reporter Jennifer Bendery. "But had we had the trifecta, I would have been."

  Boehm awards her points for her honest hypocrisy.

  But I hope someone will get my state's Senators on the record too. As NHJournal reported back in 2022: Hassan, Shaheen Complete Filibuster Flip Flop, But Effort Defeated 52-48.

  At that time, they (and all but two other Senate Democrats) favored dumping the filibuster. Now? The only question will be whether they'll be as honest as Jayapal when they flip-flop back again.