from Joel Stein's "In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book"

2020.02.24
Regarding the push to remove Confederate memorials like this, Emma says, "The world is falling apart. I'm glad I don't have any grandchildren." It's the same overwrought despair I hear when my liberal friends say Trump's election, global warming, or racism makes them not want to have kids. I intuit a deep lesson here about human beings: they are not nearly as fond of children as they claim.

Elites feel the same way about college as non-elites do about church. Actually, we feel even more strongly because we lived inside our church for four years and our church got us drunk and laid.

A few other comments about the news make it clear that the main difference between the people of Miami[, Texas] and me is that they believe there is only one right and one wrong and they're always right, whereas I believe that there is a shifting, multidimensional matrix between right and wrong and I'm always right.

Rush Limbaugh declared the Four Corners of Deceit to be government, academia, science, and media. Sure, there's a logic flaw in being told not to trust the media by one of the most influential members of the media, but nerdily pointing out logical fallacies is exactly the kind of sneaky lawyer crap the media pulls.

When you give people too much information, they instantly revert to pattern recognition [...] An electronic world retribalizes man.
Marshall McLuhan

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 world never loved perfect poise. What the world does love is commonly absence of poise, for it has to be amused. Napoleans and Andrew Jacksons amuse it, but it is not amused by perfect balance.
Henry Adams
Explains Trump and maybe Bernie Sanders. Not sure about Obama though, who was always well-poised.
Sacred history is not history, dude. It's the equivalent of saying there's proof that George Washington never told a lie. Because he cut down a cherry tree and told people about it.