Pun Salad

Andrew Heaton tells us: More text here: What America can learn from Japanese housing.

Also of note:

• Tale as old as time. Noah Smith says They need to make you hate some group. "They" being…

  In the 2010s, a bunch of right-wing types suddenly became big fans of Martin Luther King Jr.’s views on race. If you saw someone on Twitter quote MLK’s nostrum that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”, it was almost certainly someone on the right — quite a change from the type of person who probably would have cited King’s words half a century earlier. This is from an Associated Press story back in 2013:

  King’s quote has become a staple of conservative belief that “judged by the color of their skin” includes things such as unique appeals to certain voter groups, reserving government contracts for Hispanic-owned businesses, seeking more non-white corporate executives, or admitting black students to college with lower test scores.

  Many progressives railed against the idea of a colorblind society, arguing that statistical disparities between racial groups — income gaps, wealth gaps, incarceration gaps, and so on — couldn’t be remedied without writing race into official policy and becoming much more race-conscious in our daily lives.

  In the policy space, this idea manifested as DEI, which implemented racially discriminatory hiring policies across a broad swath of American business, government, academia, and nonprofits. In the media space, this manifested as a torrent of op-eds collectively criticizing white people as a group — “White men must be stopped: The very future of mankind depends on it”, “It’s Time for White People to Understand Their Whiteness”, “What is Wrong With America is Us White People”, and so on. Reputable institutions brought in speakers who made claims like “Whites are psychopaths,” and so on. Making nasty jokes about white people carried few if any professional consequences.

  In that kind of environment, it’s understandable that lots of people on the right would turn to individualist principles like the ones espoused by MLK in his famous speech. Asking to be judged by the content of your character is a reasonable defense against people who are trying to judge you based on your membership in a racial group.

  Fast-forward a few years, however, and the shoe is on the other foot.[…]

  Noah notes that Donald Trump and Steven Miller are enthusiastically back in the business of judging people, not by the content of their character, but by their color/ethnicity/religion/country of origin/etc.

  I think Noah's misguided in thinking this is something new. Or that the lefties have repented their demagoguery. It's just so cheap and easy to do, when investigating "content of their character" one-by-one is such hard work!

• Well, it should do that, then. George Will notes a case flying under the radar: The Supreme Court can strike another blow against political cynicism. (WaPo gifted link)

  Some of the damage done by “campaign finance reforms” has been reversed. And Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that likely will continue the court’s dismantling of measures the political class has enacted to control political speech about itself.

  This case can extinguish an absurdity: a campaign regulation supposedly intended to prevent parties from corrupting their own candidates. The multiplication of, and subsequent unraveling of, reformers’ laws to ration political speech is a decades-long lesson about cynicism in the guise of idealism.

  Here is a simplified history of the reformers’ priorities: beginning in the 1970s, to empower government to regulate “hard” money — that given to particular candidates. Then to limit “soft” money given to parties for organizing and advocacy. Next, to regulate “express advocacy” — speech by independent groups advocating the election or defeat of an identifiable candidate. Inevitably, to solve the “problem” of spending on issue advocacy by such groups, limiting this remnant of civic discourse unregulated by government. Reformers nibbled away at the First Amendment, an artichoke devoured leaf by leaf.

  I guess we can expect the Usual Suspects to wail about "money in politics". But money just sits there; their real hatred is aimed at the political speech that money allows to make it to listeners.

• We hardly knew ye. David Harsanyi says RIP: War Powers Are Dead.

  Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine promises he'll refile a war powers resolution in the Senate demanding President Donald Trump ask for congressional approval before launching any military strikes against Venezuela.

  A similar bill failed by a 49-51 vote in the Senate last month.

  Why does the bill specify "Trump" and "Venezuela"? For the same reason that a similar bill in June specified "Trump" and "Iran." Democrats aren't serious about constitutional war powers. They're grandstanding.

  David notes that recent Presidents, both blue and red, have pretty much done what they wanted war-wise, without involving that pesky Article I of the Constitution.

• Someone should keep score. Jeff Maurer notes, informally, that The So-Called “Experts” Have Been “Right” About “Several Crucial Things” Recently. (I think the reader is supposed to imagine Jeff making air quotes in his headline.)

  The brain-dead right and the brain-damaged left both love railing against experts. Negging expertise is a staple of the Trump administration, and leftists treat the entire field of mainstream economics as a vast, centuries-long capitalist plot. Experts, of course, are wrong about some things sometimes, which has led some people to conclude that the smart thing to do is to listen to whichever deluded rage goblin their social media algorithm shits into their feed.

  But — quietly — the experts are on a bit of a winning streak. Several recent major things have gone pretty much exactly how experts said they would. And I can’t wait for them to get credit for being right…how could they not get that credit? Experts said “If you do A, then B will happen,” and then thing A happened, followed by B, which strongly suggests that they knew what they were talking about. Probably any minute now, “mea culpas” will start rolling in from the drunk shut-ins, shameless clout chasers, and Russian chaos bots who questioned the experts in the first place.

  The first area where the experts deserve some credit is tariffs. Most economists responded to Trump’s tariffs with repulsion-bordering-on-nausea, which seems justified in hindsight: Manufacturing is down and prices are up, with the strongest effects happening in sectors most affected by tariffs. The only good news about Trump’s tariffs is that they’re: 1) Illegal, and 2) A facilitator of graft as much as an economic policy; if not for those factors, things would be worse.1 For a while, we were told that Trump’s tariff strategy was 4D chess, but if this is chess, then Trump's queen has been captured, his knight is stuck up his ass, and the board has caught on fire and is igniting several Picassos that happened to be sitting nearby.

  I'm no expert, but I thought the folks predicting tariff malfunctions were probably right.

  I don't think Jeff mentions this, from a few days ago: Nature Retracts Study Predicting Catastrophic Climate Toll