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by
Joel Stein
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January 12 - March 30, 2020
1963. That was the year Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, Medgar Evers was assassinated, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed, and President Kennedy sent the national guard to force the desegregation of the University of Alabama. If you were erecting Civil War tributes in 1963, it wasn’t because you were a passionate US history buff torn between commissioning a statue of James Madison or Stonewall Jackson.
2017 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 48 percent of Republicans thought there was “a lot of discrimination” against Christians, while only 27 percent of them thought there was “a lot of discrimination” against black people; 43 percent thought there was a lot of discrimination against whites.
three-day forecasts of high temperatures are now as accurate as one-day forecasts were in 2005, making a huge difference to people involved in aviation, commercial fishing, and last-minute three-day vacations.
The Meteorologist Fallacy™ is used to dismiss scientists for doing their job, which is discovering new information by questioning previous assumptions.
Emotions are so unreliable that therapists heal people of post-traumatic stress disorder by telling them to ignore their strongest instincts. Not reacting to our gut instincts is why people meditate.
Italian and Irish people, once considered so foreign, are now seen as indistinguishable members of the white majority. Yet this doesn’t stop the race baiting.
After being in Miami for a couple of days, I can see that Vicki has a point. Elites may not have caused racism, but they’ve magnified racial tensions, in the same way that abolitionists exacerbated our nation’s problem with slavery. Cops have been shooting black people for a long time, but Black Lives Matter brought attention to the issue. Fighting back does increase tension.
But as unfair as it is for the country to pass laws affecting the lives of people still living in the 1950s, it’s dangerous for people in the 1950s to vote on how people in the twenty-first century should behave. Besides, these people are not Amish; the twenty-first century is part of their lives. If they want to use their smartphones to look at the Gospel Station Network and wear low-priced clothes from the Pampa Walmart twenty-five miles away, if they want to remain safe from North Korea’s nuclear bombs and save their cattle from rising temperatures, then our country can no longer simply be
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I want to explain that black people force their kids to watch YouTube videos of shootings over and over in hopes of figuring out how to follow police instructions flawlessly for fear of getting one movement wrong and getting killed for speeding.
I wonder if the growth in the global Christian population is due to the fact that they spent centuries building up powerful immunities to communicable diseases.
When Angelenos say, “We should have lunch sometime,” they don’t mean that we will have lunch. They mean, “I like you enough that if we were in the same restaurant at the same time, I would sit with you.”
“You smell like somewhere else,” he says. I smile and think, I smell like America.
At first I figured the navy must have been annoyed that his codes were so easy to break. Then I realized that asking an elite not to tell you everything he knows is like asking an elite not to be elite.
Trump isn’t some isolated malignant mole that can be sliced off but rather part of an authoritarian cancer spreading throughout the world.
Conspiracy theories appeal to populists because they simplify. They blame villains for random horrors. Psychological studies show that people who feel a lack of control over their lives or the world are more likely to believe conspiracy theories, which offer a simple reason for their lack of agency.
They also empower them. The conspiracist gets to be Sherlock Holmes, piecing together tiny clues to solve a crime committed by a small, corrupt group. This group is always the Jews. I know this because we talked about it at the Reboot conference in Utah.
The populists have not won, as I feared on election night. There are still more of us in power than them.
“Talk to an Expert, at any time, on any subject,” the app advertises, though apparently an expert on capitalization is not yet available.
Populism argues that the modern era requires ducking the barrage of facts because they are indistinguishable from lies.
Scott’s argument that lies are good and truth is bad is the Orwellian core of authoritarianism.
I confused imperfection with complete corruption. I believed in the Meteorologist Fallacy™.
frustration. I got chiggers from orienteering in the woods in Tennessee and my Beverly Hills doctor, unfamiliar with orienteering, Tennessee, or woods, thought it was a rash and gave me a shot of steroids. The steroid shot did nothing other than melding the chigger DNA with my own DNA and turning me into Chiggerman, a superhero who doesn’t get to fight crime because he has to spend all his time calming
African-American citizens who misheard him when he announced his superhero name.
It’s not only young people: my mom’s
email signature is “To thine own self be true,” which is Shakespearean for “Fuck everyone else.”
Narcissism has been destroying truth. Liberals have been dangerously eroding the word truth when they use it instead of perspective or side of the story in the phrase “sharing your truth.” On college campuses, believing in science itself is questioned because it has been used by those in power to oppress others: phrenology to justify racism, nutrition to shame fat people, and psychology to institutionalize gays. In its place, professors teach truths based on personal narratives that can’t be questioned by people outside the author’s tribe because they cannot know the truth of that group’s
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But still, the press is high enough on the list that it’s usually the first industry dictators take over.
He wrote a fake news story claiming that one of their hateful, addle-brained conspiracy theories was true. Then he waited for the alt-right to believe it. At which point he would reveal his article was fake, thereby exposing their stupidity and destroying their movement. The first half of his plan worked. His fake news story got lots of views from conservatives who thought it was true. But no one cared when he revealed it was fake.
The Chinese saying for this is “Three men make a tiger,” which states that if enough people make up a story about a tiger hanging out at a busy market, everyone will believe it.
He believed Fox News is a wing of the Republican Party. This was a great relief until he added that CNN and the New York Times are wings of the Democratic Party. All news, he believed, is propaganda. This is a hard argument to combat because Time, the New York Times, and CNN are indeed staffed nearly entirely by liberals; I watched reporters cry in the Time offices when the Bush v. Gore verdict came in. This is not new: the conservative founder of Time, Henry Luce, grumbled about his staff, “For some goddamn reason, Republicans can’t write.”
I know that the New York Times fidelity is to truth, not policy.
Rush Limbaugh declared the Four Corners of Deceit to be government, academia, science, and media.
When you distrust elites it seeps into everything. Back in 1960, 58 percent of Americans believed “most people can be trusted.” In 2014, that number had dropped by nearly half.
The Internet is the opposite of novels: it’s an empathy-reducing machine.
The more men are freed from privation; the more telegraphs, telephones, books, papers, and journals there are; the more means there will be of diffusing inconsistent lies and hypocrisies, and the more disunited and consequently miserable will men become.
They saw the headlines on Facebook and forwarded them to others.
Articles are no longer consumed to learn facts. Articles are grenades to throw at your enemies.
Boat owners are, objectively, bad people. Boat owners are so dangerous that every country has agreed that as soon as they get twelve nautical miles from the shore, they are not our problem, no matter what horrible things they do.
He later called the speculators the “elite” and rentiers like him the “super-elite,” because rentiers don’t know many words. But since the two sides neatly divide between those who value education over money and those who value money over education, I’m going to call them the Intellectual Elite and the Boat Elite.
He handed the next guy his cappuccino, which also had a foam heart, as if I suddenly meant nothing to him. Then the woman behind us got her drink and it, too, was foam-hearted. This guy was hitting on anything that drank caffeine. Slowly, I realized that our society had become so civilized that straight men can draw each other hearts just because it’s nifty looking.
Worse, when he’s at a restaurant, he orders aged steaks well done and then pours ketchup on them. If he had listened to the expertise offered by chefs, cookbook authors, and food critics instead of relying on his first reaction like a toddler, he would have gotten acclimated to the texture of a medium-rare steak. Then he wouldn’t need vinegar sugar to compensate for the moisture and flavor he removed by overcooking it. If Intellectual Elites weren’t dedicated to legal principles, they would make well-done steaks the core of their impeachment arguments.
He does what all Boat Elite do when their honor is questioned: he fights. He goes full Boat Elite, roaring with unfiltered instinct. He cries, yells, accuses the Democrats of conspiracy, does not mention opera once, and says that he likes beer more than thirty times.
The worst is when he refers to Ulysses—which I celebrate annually by going to Bloomsday events—as “James Joyce’s unreadable modernist novel.”
noblesse oblige,
Putting America first is selfish considering that we’re already first in GDP, currency reserves, military spending, medical research, movies, tech, natural gas production, and international calling code numbers. Nationalism is cruel. In his 1945 essay “Notes on Nationalism,” George Orwell defined nationalism as “the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.”
It’s irresponsible to buy straw for foreigners while refusing to even hire American-born Americans as my gardeners and house-cleaners.
Even if it is legal, it’s weird that our neighborhood’s disgust with guns does not extend to having other people wield them for us.
Whatever his reasons, Tucker makes a good argument that angrily dismissing all populist complaints as mere racism is lazy.
You do practice democracy for its own sake. It’s not a tool you choose because it delivers more money, more happiness, or even more peace. You choose democracy because freedom, human rights, and self-government are moral goods. If those goods have a price, we should be happy to pay it.
The far left is becoming populist. They subscribe to the tribalism of identity politics. They question the knowability of truth. And, based on the little I know about Greenpeace, they love boats.
