Workin’ for the Weekend #72: Merry Christmas, Boozehounds!

Also: MoyniCNN, and notes on my immature individualism

Merry pre-Christmas from Gay Paree, where the Legos have that certain je ne sais quoi and the super-sized American fast-food joints (including Krispy Kreme, 50 yards from this photograph) have lines snaking around the block. It’s all glorious, already had my first foie gras Ravioles du Royan, je ne regrette rien.

* Look, I don’t make the rules, I just acknowledge that we thrive in an informally enforced rules-based order. That means when you insane people mail us your painstakingly made hooch, and it is indeed delicious, and we slurp it up while recording, you will get your hooch-production facility slathered onto the Weekend Links. In other words, KANZLER!!!!

* OK, OK, equal time for the Chattanooga boys.

I see several applicable lessons: 1) Make delicious hooch! 2) Mail it to yer boyz (however defined). 3) If you hear tell of people making delicious hooch and mailing it to their boyz, maybe click on their YouTubes and consider making an order or paying a visit. In this way the universe heals, Amen.

* Look, they still let that Moynihan fellow on television sometimes! Here he is on CNN Thursday talking about—who woulda thunk!—elite-institution plagiarism and congressional-performance scandals.

* Speaking of campus anti-Semitism, Jon Haidt, who has somehow never been a guest on this podcast, uncorked a big Substack piece Thursday headlined “Why Antisemitism Sprouted So Quickly on Campus.” Relatedly, our friends at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression released a real good & timely set of principles for steering out of the academic free-speech ditch: “As confidence in higher ed reaches historic lows, it is time for campus leaders to re-establish their institutions as communities devoted to the discovery, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge.” I was particularly drawn to this one, for reasons that extend beyond academia:

7. Prohibit disruptive and violent conduct

Disruptive conduct is often used to enforce orthodoxy and punish dissent on campus.

Violence, shout-downs, vandalism, classroom occupations, and blocking passageways are all examples of unprotected conduct that threatens an institution’s values of free inquiry. Too often such behavior goes uninvestigated and unpunished — or is even encouraged by college administrators. Behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated. Colleges must have the greatest tolerance for opinion and no tolerance for violence.

* The dumb campaign to make Substack more censorious likely petered out this week, with a note Thursday from Episode #369 veteran Hamish McKenzie (“I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views. But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don't think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse”), and especially from this bravura rant by Ben Dreyfuss (#83, #97, #148, #214, Members Only #129, M.O. #140, #392, M.O. #180), titled “Substack Doesn't Have A Nazi Problem. It Has A ‘Deplatformers Won't Accept They Lost The War’ Problem.” Excerpt:

After Trump won in 2016, everyone marched for a few days and demanded he resign. Then he didn’t resign, and they said, “But we’re still angry. What other institutions can we vent these frustrations at that might be more susceptible to our pressure?” And so they decided that the New York Times was to blame. Rabble, rabble, rabble! If only Maggie Haberman had used the word LIE. Etc. One of the other institutions they set their sights on was Facebook. They had a great deal of success with pressuring Facebook, which in 2015 was one of America’s most admired companies, but by 2017, was tarred and feathered and blamed for all the indignities of daily life.

Facebook was shaken by this. They were scared on a business level, but also, internally, their own employees bought into the narrative that they had been naive and caused the world to fall, just like the New York Times.

The NYT—and the liberal media at large—fell for this because it fed into their own professional narcissism. Immediately.  By Trump’s inauguration, democracy was dying in darkness, etc.… […]

Emboldened by the success of finding institutions they could force to respond to their pressures, this group of lefties went hunting for more censorious victories. And they found them. All the companies accepted that words were the devil, and the companies, reluctant though they may be, had to protect the stupid pigs from being exposed to the beguiling charms of bad speech.

This went on for four years, during which time the ideological project of de-platforming as a concept became sacrosanct in many left-of-center circles. By 2020, it was dominant in the liberal media…. But it wasn’t until January 6^th that this illiberal project truly reached its peak. For months and years, activists had demanded that Trump be banned from Twitter and Facebook, but the companies had found squirrely ways of getting out of that since regardless of whether Trump had, in fact, violated terms of service, it just would have been a big change that pissed a lot of people off.

January 6^th changed that. It was so bad, and everyone was so mad that they all fell in line and said, “Okay, suspended/banned/etc.”

That was the height of this movement. Every day since, it has been in retreat.

There are many reasons for that! For one thing, this entire idiotic idea, though led by true believing leftists, was given oxygen and momentum by normie liberals, who stopped giving one fuck about anything when Trump stopped being president.

Also, a lot of the people who had been bullied into going along with the radical whims of their self-righteous staff felt regret about it once the pandemic was over, and they started taking Zoloft again.

* Our friend and fellow Israel co-junketeer, Comedy Cellar owner Noam Dworman, continued his recent string of contentious Live from the Table interviews Friday with a blunt confrontation over long-accused anti-Israel bias with former Human Rights Watch executive director Ken Roth. From Noam’s write-up: “He walks off after about 35 minutes of a 60-minute interview. In our view, this is an expose of the deep bias that permeates Human Rights Watch. You be the judge….Ironically, we also offer an apology to Norman Finkelstein here. This is quite an episode.”

* This one comes recommended by many: Russ Roberts (another how-have-we-missed-him non-guest) did an EconTalk with Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur, who “takes us on a deep dive into the origins of Israel—how European Jew-hatred gave birth to Zionism and the founding of the Jewish state in 1948. He then turns to the rise of Palestinian terrorism and explains why the Palestinian experience and the Israeli experience are so incompatible. Along the way, Gur places the Holocaust in a much broader European context. I learned an immense amount from this conversation and hope you do, too.”

* A few days back Jessemy asked me why I don’t sign group letters. My answer prompted some spelunking into the archive, and sure enough! Embarrassments abound, such as my first column as an official L.A. Times employee:

The newspaper you are reading has been lovingly compiled by hundreds of humans who urinated into plastic measuring cups for the privilege of bringing it to you.

I gather this is not widely known among readers, judging by the reaction from those I’ve told. “Why would the L.A. Times care whether you’ve smoked pot?” goes the typical response. It doesn’t help with the comprehension that it’s not immediately evident that anyone here actually does.

Yet it’s been company policy for at least 18 years that every new hire excrete on command while a rubber-gloved nurse waits outside with her ear plastered to the door. Those who test positive for illegal drugs don’t get their promised job, on grounds that someone who can’t stay off the stuff long enough to pass a one-time, advance-notice screening might have a problem. (And yes, it has happened in the newsroom a handful of times.) This despite the fact that we generally don’t operate machinery heavier than a coffee pot, aren’t likely to sell our secrets to blackmailing Russkies and are supposed to be at least theoretically representative of typical Americans.

* And it’s always knives-out season from me about registering for the draft, as this barky conclusion to an otherwise informative piece shows:

Government can and will find the most symbolic and indefensible requirement to stick into the ribs of its subjects, and then even in the absence of formal enforcement will find ways to make non-adherents suffer through the ever-advancing accumulation of mandates it imposes on the behavior of allegedly free men.

The Selective Service is a pile of leftover authoritarian garbage from a century no current would-be draftee was even born in. It's long since past time to stick it on a barge and set it on fire.

Walkoff music comes from an ornery cuss who nevertheless did NOT say no to his country. Merry Christmas, everyone!