Oct
15
2025

My Latest Lame Twitter Reply

Really bad, isn't it? Especially when you consider that Barack and Michelle almost certainly had to give it their OK.

Also of note:

  • Also piling up in my things-to-blog list.

    Maybe we should have been using smaller words, so folks like Scott Simon could have figured this out previously.

    As you've certainly heard, the Democrat demands for shutdown-ending focus on the "health care" stuff. But (apparently) they are also demanding about $500 million in cash going to their allies at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which still exists, see above).

    Just say no.

  • And probably too much fun. Kevin D. Williamson explains Why Snobbery Is Cheap. (archive.today link) KDW mentions the multiple botches in a recently-read book which involved a shell casing ejected from "9mm revolver" equipped with a silencer.

    I'm not a gun guy, but even I know that's an unlikely combination. The lesson KDW draws:

    Your average voter out there, walking around with his mushy-brained and half-educated opinions about this and that, doesn’t need to know a great deal about firearms. Democracy insists upon enfranchising the ignoramuses, who also get a vote on any number of other issues about which they know little or nothing. Two cheers for democracy and all that. But if you happen to be writing, translating, editing, or publishing a book about two military conflicts, and if that book from time to time delves into details about the weapons used in those conflicts, then, in that case, you might want to know something about the subject. Intellectual tidiness is desirable in and of itself, of course, but on purely literary grounds, errors of that sort pull the more informed kind of reader out of the story—the analogous case is science-fiction writing that gets the basic science wrong. It doesn’t work as literature.

    It also doesn’t work as argument. 

    There is a whole rhetoric of mockery deployed in the gun-policy debate, and you’ve probably heard examples of it, the idea being that gun-rights advocates who correct people about the difference between a clip and a magazine or a semiautomatic weapon and a fully automatic weapon were just weirdos who are trying to avoid talking about the real issues—as though the technical aspects of firearms design weren’t the actual issue. Ignorance about firearms is taken as a kind of badge of honor, a sign that one is not one of those people—the unwashed.

    The root issue is snobbery. If you know any music snobs or movie snobs, then you may have observed that a snob is not obsessed with his own taste in music or movies—he is obsessed with your taste, with everybody else’s taste, and takes pleasure not from the things he enjoys but from heaping scorn on the things other people enjoy that he judged contemptible. People who actually know things and who have a genuinely cultivated critical sensibility tend to be the opposite of High Fidelity-style ranking-list snobs: My friend Jay Nordlinger, who is a classical music critic when he is not doing one of his four other jobs, is the least snobby person you will ever meet when it comes to music. A critic is interested in music—a snob is interested in what his choice of music says about him.

    So: if you detect snobbery here at Pun Salad, please know that it's unintentional. If scorn is heaped, I'll try to limit it to heaping it on stupidity, lunacy, and evil.

    [Jay Nordlinger acknowledges and comments on Kevin's post here. Among many other things.]

  • An idea whose time is gone. The WSJ editorialists look at an issue SCOTUS could knock out of the park soon: A Supreme Court Reckoning for Racial Gerrymanders. (WSJ gifted link)

    Here we go again. The Supreme Court keeps getting dragged into redistricting fights involving race, and this week the Justices will rehear a racial gerrymander challenge to Louisiana’s Congressional map. It could be a landmark that ends the cynical use of race by both major parties to advance their partisan interests.

    In recent years, the Justices have considered challenges to maps in Texas, South Carolina, Alabama and Louisiana. They punted last term on deciding the Louisiana case (Louisiana v. Callais) that they will reconsider Wednesday. They will also take up the question of whether the intentional creation of majority-minority districts violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition against abridging a citizen’s right to vote based on race. The right answer is yes.

    I'd say the right answer is "Hell, yes! What's wrong with you?"

    Not that it matters, but the linked article pictures a pro-racial gerrymander demonstration, captioned: "Black Louisiana voters and civil rights advocates call on SCOTUS to uphold a fair and representative congressional map in Louisiana v. Callais at Supreme Court." That's … very interesting wording.

    Apparently, oral arguments on Louisiana v. Callais are happening (literally) as I type.

  • Where it's due. George Will ascribes: Primary credit for the Gaza ceasefire goes to the IDF — and Netanyahu. (WaPo gifted link)

    Unminced words are now required lest we flinch from acknowledging the stark — and for many people, unsettling — lesson of Israel’s achievement since Oct. 7, 2023. The lesson is: Often military might does, and often only it can, make room for diplomacy.

    Primary credit for the ceasefire between Israel and those who still aspire to murder it goes to the Israel Defense Forces. So, credit also goes to the prime minister who wielded the IDF with a properly austere regard for the opinions of mankind, Benjamin Netanyahu.

    Is GFW forgetting someone? A couple paragraphs down:

    The U.S. Declaration of Independence acknowledges an obligation to have “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” (emphasis added). Indecent respect occurs when the opinions of mankind are not respectable, or when respecting them involves indecent consequences. To the Trump administration’s credit, the United States has enabled Israel’s victory by not restraining its self-defense. U.S. policy has too often restrained Ukraine since Russia attacked on Feb. 24, 2022.

    That's his only mention. George isn't a Trump fan, and I'm not either, so…

  • Let's go to a Trump fan for balance Victor Davis Hanson in the Free Press lists Trump’s 10 Moves That Changed the Middle East. Just the first couple:

    1. Trump curtailed a considerable amount of Iranian oil income and its dispersal. He stopped, for the near future, the Iranian effort to build a bomb. Trump also allowed Israel to destroy Tehran’s air defenses, humiliate it militarily, and eliminate many of its top military officers and nuclear physicists. Thus, Israel’s half-century-long worries about Iranian nukes were addressed. At the same time, its stature as a military power soared to an all-time high—even if it became more isolated politically. Israel became more confident but also more sensitive to past, current, and future American military and political support—or pressure.
    2. Trump allowed Benjamin Netanyahu to destroy Hamas, cripple Hezbollah, and retaliate at will against the Houthis. That liberation led to general dejection among Israel’s enemies and a resurgence in Netanyahu’s own political fortunes. And that rise of Israel and the collapse of the Iranian terrorist network—the “ring of fire”—explain the greater chances for a ceasefire and possibly a peace. Trump allowed no daylight between Israel and the U.S., which, under the Biden administration, may have sent the wrong signals to Hamas prior to October 7.

    So read the other eight and see what you think.