Pun Salad

Jeff Maurer's headline is a little gross, but anyway: Trump's Appointments Are Like When You Buy Bread, Eggs, and Shampoo to Hide the Fact that You're Also Buying Porn and a Big Tub of Vaseline.

Yeah, but let's skip down to the appointment porn. Sure, Pete Hegseth was bad, but…

But I'm sure Kevin D. Williamson has a more balanced take… oh, I guess not. He imagines some nominees on The Mount Rushmore of Putzes.

And further down:

And finally a less colorful take from the NR editorialists: Senate Should Reject Matt Gaetz Attorney General Nomination.

As I've been saying for a number of days now: we'll see how that works out.

Also of note:

• "We'd tell you about our successes, but then we'd have to kill you." On Reason's abolition kick, Ronald Bailey says: Abolish the NSA and CIA.

  In his 2020 book The Spymasters, journalist Chris Whipple quotes one former agency director as saying, "A president would never abolish the CIA because then he would have no one to blame." And the agency is colossally blameworthy.

  The CIA failed to anticipate North Korea's invasion of the South, the Vietcong's Tet Offensive, the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the collapse of the USSR, the 9/11 terror attacks, the Arab Spring uprisings, and Russia's invasion of the Crimean peninsula. The agency's fingerprints were on the Bay of Pigs fiasco and on specious reports of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Blowback from the CIA's covert political meddling gave us an Islamist regime in Iran and its concomitant support of Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, not to mention the creation of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. And then there's the agency's brutal, useless, and illegal post-9/11 torture program.

  As for the NSA: Americans should be grateful to Edward Snowden for revealing how that agency misused Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to spy on our telephone and internet communications. The unconstitutional bulk collection of domestic telephone records finally ended when Section 215 expired in 2020. But in April 2024, Congress further abetted warrantless NSA domestic spying by expanding Section 702 powers to require data centers, cable companies, and even landlords to give the agency access to our private communications.

  The good news is that Tulsi, should she be confirmed as Director of National Intelligence, would have a lot less on her plate.

• And when liberalism has problems, we all do. Bob Ewing says Liberalism Has a Communications Problem. You'll want to read the hair-raising story of his wife's difficult pregnancy, that (whew) turned out OK. Lesson learned:

  Maryrose and Pearson are alive and healthy today because a vast network of people cooperated across time and space to save them. Virtually all our ancestors throughout history who were in my wife’s situation died, and so did their babies. But today, nearly all of them survive.

  This vast global collaboration would not have been possible without a society based on classical liberal principles: the specialization of labor based on individuals’ desire and aptitude, the freedom for people to start businesses and research new ideas, the ability for nations to trade freely with each other and exchange information and so on.

  As you read that previous sentence, the list of principles may have seemed dry and irrelevant. But if our society didn’t operate according to those principles, my wife and son might not have survived.

  It's an excellent article. The only drawback is it may make you more likely to slug the next person you hear use "liberal" (or variants) as a slur.

• It's not as if they were good at it. I'm turning into a minor Yascha Mounk fanboy. His latest advice column: Dear Journalists: Stop Trying to Save Democracy. I'm going to snip off his lead anecdotes about working for the International Herald Tribune.

  This nicely sums up the bygone attitude of journalists. As a group, they have always skewed left, and perhaps always will. But they also had a strong conception of their role and the professional standards it entails: Their job was to be fair arbiters, reporting without fear or favor. This involved posing tough questions to everyone and about everything. And to accomplish that, they needed to cultivate a strong bullshit detector, starting from the premise that anyone they talk to has their own story to spin. To be sure, journalism, even in its halcyon days, never fully lived up to these aspirations; but the existence of these aspirations did do a lot to curtail the profession’s partisan lean and preserve some modicum of trust in mainstream news outlets.

  All of that went out of the window when Donald Trump first entered politics. Political scientists like myself were sounding the alarm that authoritarian populists may represent a genuine danger to democracy. Other commentators were going even further, claiming that Trump should be understood, simply, as a fascist. Faced with what they regarded as a genuine emergency, many younger and more progressive journalists came to believe that they needed to revolutionize their profession’s traditional conception of its mission. Rather than eschewing the spirit of party, they now openly advocated for taking the side of the angels. And far from striving for objectivity, they resolved to offer their readers “moral clarity.” The Washington Post was merely formalizing the emerging consensus when, in February 2017, it adopted the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

  I'm currently reading a book by Mounk, and it's pretty good. Look for a report in a few days.

• “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” That's an appropriate Orwell quote to go with John Cochrane's take on a Nobel economist: A distillation of nonsense. Looking at Daron Acemoglu's recent interview:

  Given the potential for AI to exacerbate inequality, how can we redirect technology?

  We need to actively steer technological development in a direction that benefits broader swathes of humanity. This require a pro-human approach that prioritises enhancing worker productivity and autonomy, supporting democracy and citizen empowerment, and fostering creativity and innovation.

  To achieve this, we need to: a) Change the narrative around technology, emphasising societal control and a focus on human well-being. b) Build strong countervailing powers, such as labour unions and civil society organisations, to balance the power of tech companies, and c) Implement policies that level the playing field, including tax reforms that discourage automation and promote labour, data rights for individuals and creative workers, and regulations on manipulative digital advertising practices.

  Cochrane lets loose:

  The language alone is infuriating. Who is this “we?” “A pro-human approach that prioritizes…” just who is doing what here?

  The invisible subject is obvious. “We” and the hidden subject of passive voice means state control. And since AI development is an international competition, it means somehow stopping other countries from allowing their AI to develop in the direction of greatest usefulness.

  Productivity is exactly what all profit-driven innovation achieves. But how do “we” increase productivity while simultaneously “discourag[ing] automation?” “Supporting democracy?” The same “we” who “steers” the private efforts, private investments, and private property of others to “democracy” is about the most anti-democratic vision I can imagine. Does anyone need to “steer” technology to “foster creativity and innovation?”

  The tool is the regulatory state, law, and the industrial policy state. The first two can only forbid activity, reduce the choice set. The third can subsidize, but in practice serves to protect the status quo and political goals.

  Cochrane is a self-described "grumpy economist", see if he can't make you grumpy too.