The Invisible Counterpoint

Simple prosperity, in the eyes of people who feel they'll be abandoned for it If one is attending to Michael Moore or Chris Hedges or Robert Reich or ... pretty much every liberal right now, one is hearing that liberals have to acknowledge that the reason they were caught off guard by Trump is that they hadn't previously wanted to look at the extent of the economic hurt that was out there: they were in a bubble. They detached themselves from other people's suffering, and engaged with them only to hate them for their bigotry... for being the basket of deplorables they ostensibly only are. If one is listening to Thomas Frank and Chris Hedges and Andrew Sullivan, specifically, we are being made to understand that this was quite deliberate: that liberals have come to hate the people who've been battered most by the global economy that emerged since Clinton.  I think that liberals have wanted to detach themselves from an America they saw correctly as not...

Part of what Milo argues is what Chris Hedges argues. That we have a liberal professional class that covets its rulership more than anything else. With both of them, trolls didn't necessitate this class regrettably closing its doors. Rather, enjoying the idea of their foreclosed ownership of what is right opinion and correct manners -- enjoying being distinct and better than everyone else -- they sought out means to classify everyone outside of their class as predators, trolls, deplorables. To both Milo and Hedges, our situation is Versailles.  And the problem for the left is that there is truth in this. We just live outside those periods of unambiguous growth where the most progressive people out there -- which is always the left -- are absolutely uninterested in bourgeois/genteel pretensions. We've had that age -- the 60s. Now we are living in one where -- though they cannot acknowledge it -- they actually do enjoy the idea that they and their children will be part...

CJ Werleman wrote:  The Christian Right’s ideology drives virtually all social policy debate within the Republican Party, whether it’s immigration, women’s reproductive rights, the death penalty, or same-sex marriage. Chris Hedges says the Christian Right’s ideology calls for the “eradication of social ‘deviants,’ beginning with gay men and lesbians, whose sexual orientation, those in the movement say, is a curse and an illness, contaminating the American family and the country. Once these ‘deviants’ are removed, other ‘deviants,’ including Muslims, liberals, feminists, intellectuals, left-wing activists, undocumented workers, poor African-Americans and those dismissed as ‘nominal Christians’—meaning Christians who do not embrace this peculiar interpretation of the Bible—will also be ruthlessly repressed. The ‘deviant’ government bureaucrats, the ‘deviant’ media, the ‘deviant’ schools and the ‘deviant’ churches, all agents of Satan, will be crushed or radically reformed. The r...

Malcolm Gladwell was born in 1963, in England. He moved to Canada as a child, and still identifies as a Canadian author. His new book, “David and Goliath,” “is a very Canadian sort of book,” he says. The theme of his book is that underdogs — Davids — win over powerful opponents — Goliaths — more often than people think. “David and Goliath,” Gladwell says, is “Canadian in its suspicion of bigness and wealth and power.” . . . Christopher Chabris is a psychology professor at Union College in New York. In 2013, he studied Gladwell’s newest book in order to write a review for the Wall Street Journal. Here’s what Chabris found : In Gladwell’s previous book people like attorney David Boies were said to be successful because of their environment (his parents were teachers) and because of hours of work (he debated in college). Now, Boies’ success happens for a simpler, more uplifting reason: Because he was dyslexic. Gladwell calls dyslexia a “desirable difficulty.” But there was a p...

Writing about the viral “Diane in 7A” story — a “Bachelor” producer’s story, told on Twitter , of his dealing with a rude airplane passenger on Thanksgiving by harassing her via passed notes — Salon previously noted “Nothing about Gale’s story passes the smell test.” And, indeed, Elan Gale has admitted that he made Diane in 7A up. So concludes a saga that “ won Thanksgiving ” even despite the creepy, sexist valences of a man telling a woman, via repeated notes, “Eat my dick”; Gale tweeted, last night , a picture of “Diana [sic] sitting in a chair.” The chair was empty. Though Gale’s been praised for “brilliant writing and execution” even in spite of the fact that the long, convoluted saga of Diane would seem not to have happened, there’s very little substance behind the story that caught the imaginations of Twitter users over the Thanksgiving holiday. All the reader had to go on to presume Diane deserved a series of notes telling her off was Gale’s own point of view. The follo...