Pun Salad

Is it just me, or is anyone else thinking that Disney would have had a more successful movie if they had gone with Snow White and the Seven Underpants Gnomes for their reboot?

And, as South Park memes go, I'm pretty sure the Trump Administration would have had better luck with the Underpants Gnomes instead of "Blame Canada".

But anyway: as the relevant Wikipedia article says, the meme (image at your right) is widely "used to mock poorly-thought-out business and political strategies."

And that's what came to mind when I read this "news" story at the website of my worthless local newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat, telling the story of a fractious town hall meeting featuring my CongressCritter: Frustrated Dems urge U.S. Rep. Chris Pappas to stand up to Trump: 'Fight, fight, fight'.

But it's not just in New Hampshire, it's a nationwide movement! As Noah Rothman describes: Democrat professional strategists suggested the party, among other moves, "[a]bandon the boutique fixations, quixotic crusades, and linguistic codes that transformed the party from a national political enterprise into an exclusive club." But:

This is actually worse than the Underpants Gnomes' strategy, which at least had a sensible Phase 3, "Profit". Instead it seems to go something like:

Phase 1:

Fight, Fight, Fight!

Phase 2:

 ?

Phase 3:

I will see my anxiety reflected! Or something!

I'm unqualified to speculate on the psychological motivations here. Maybe I should reread Eric Hoffer?

Also of note:

• "And we would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for…" Matt Ridley describes How scientists misled the world about Covid's origins. "Mistakes were made", ones that killed people. But:

  But all those errors pale beside the biggest one of the lot, and the one that has done most to undermine trust in scientists – that is, the initial insistence that the virus did not originate in a laboratory accident. We now know that it almost certainly did. The evidence is overwhelming, as I have rehearsed many times. And it now includes a huge stack of documents – inadvertently made public and spotted by two open-source investigators, ‘Billy Bostickson’ and Gilles Demaneuf – that shows just how systematically we were deceived about this mother of all scandals.

  Matt describes the manipulations that (for a while) successfully fooled people into thinking the lab leak hypothesis had been successfully debunked. And:

  Several months later, I discovered that I had been lied to: deliberately, maliciously, consequentially. Yes, I am angry about that. So should you be.

  Why, I'm so angry, I'm gonna go to my CongressCritter's town hall meeting, and … never mind.

• I think Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies. Rossana Pineyro wonders if Junior has his own Underpants Gnome scheme in mind: RFK Jr. wants to ban food dyes. Will that improve public health?

  Phase 1:

  Ban food dyes!

  Phase 2:

   ?

  Phase 3:

  Public health improves!

  Not so fast:

  But critics argue these studies don't reflect real-world consumption levels. "The cancer-causing 'links' found in studies are based on dangerously high doses given to lab rats in amounts no human would ever consume, even if they ate a whole box of cereal or pack of hot dogs," says Bill Wirtz, a senior policy analyst at the Consumer Choice Center. "Banning food dyes is a performative regulatory action. All dyes currently used by manufacturers do not pose a known health risk to consumers."

  My current favorite food dye is astaxanthin! Don't take away my pleasingly pink salmon, Junior!

• I admit it's pretty far down on the list for me. Bryan Caplan proves it: People Barely Care About Equality.

  Almost everyone claims to deeply care about equality. Many leftist thinkers barely talk about anything but equality. The rest of the political spectrum is less monomaniacal, but almost everyone talks about inequality as a grave social ill: “I don’t want to live in society where some people have so much more than others.”

  A few right-leaning thinkers distinguish between evil “poverty” and morally neutral “inequality.” But even they rarely add: “99% of the ‘poor’ in my country are rich by world and historic standards, so the problem of poverty has basically been solved.” Instead, no matter how absolutely rich “their poor” get, the fretting continues unabated. Which suggests, again, that people care about equality even when they explicitly deny it.

  With all this verbiage on its side, how can anyone doubt that humanity’s yearning for equality is genuine? Simple: Remember the adage that, “Actions speak louder than words,” and notice that anyone who yearns to live in a highly egalitarian society can unilaterally do so.

  Spoiler: They could do by moving to a more equal locality. But nobody does this. Hence…

  But Bryan's article sent me to Wikipedia's: List of U.S. states and territories by income inequality. Surprisingly, New Hampshire is pretty "equal". Ranked by Gini coefficient, desending order, NH is in 44th place among states, plus Puerto Rico and D.C.

• Defending the sacred cow. Self-described "bleeding heart libertarian" Matt Zwolinski looks at Libertarianism's Democracy Problem.

  Like a lot of people these days, I’m pretty worried about the future of constitutional democracy in America. Whatever you think about the substantive merit of Trump’s policy agenda, the process by which he is pursuing it - a process that has so far involved the dismantling of bureaucratic expertise, attacks on the independent judiciary, attacks on the free press, and a general undermining of the separation of powers - should be deeply concerning.

  A lot of libertarians, however, seem not to be concerned at all. In fact, many of them are positively reveling. As they see it, Trump and Musk are tearing down a system that is fundamentally corrupt. And if the methods they employ are somewhat unorthodox, well, what do you expect? The whole system is rigged against reform, so the only way to get the change we need is to operate somewhat outside the normal rules of the game.

  The fact is, most libertarians just don’t think all that highly of democracy. This isn’t new. And they’re not that subtle about it. Book titles like Against Democracy and Democracy: The God That Failed don’t leave much room for guesswork even if, in the former case, the actual position advocated is a good deal more nuanced than the title suggests.

  I'm one of those libertarians who "don’t think all that highly of democracy." But Matt's argument deserves to be read and taken seriously. I've read Against Democracy, and liked it a lot. I see the other book mentioned is available via Interlibrary Loan from Tufts, so someday…