On Being In With The In Crowd

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Do you have a burning desire to be in with the in crowd? I do not. Maybe that’s what makes me a contrarian.

But the desire to be in with the in crowd is certainly a very common and powerful human instinct. You might even think that this desire is universal. If so, then you probably suspect that I must be lying when I say that I have no desire to be in with the in crowd. It must be that I have always been so nerdy and awkward that I was never going to be in with the cool people, so I had to develop this contrarian schtick in order to preserve some pitiful semblance of self-worth.

OK, you can go right ahead and think that. At least I don’t go around regularly making a fool of myself in a desperate quest for approval from the cool people. And our current in crowd is rather achingly dumb, which means that anyone pursuing their approval is regularly going to make a fool of him or herself.

Yes, I am talking about Mitt Romney. . . .

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Is Ruth Bader Ginsburg A Good Supreme Court Justice?

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Several months ago, it was "RBG," a documentary heaping praise on progressive icon Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  Now in the past week we have seen released a new Hollywood bio-pic, “On the Basis of Sex,” with actors playing the Notorious RBG, her family, and other characters.  The reviews overall are pretty bad, but there's no question that the idea of the film is to heap praise and make an enduring heroine out of the great justice who stands up to Republican appointees like Brett Kavanaugh.  Here is a roundup of reviews from the left-wing British newspaper The Independent.  Example:

The Hollywood Reporter . . .:  "The dramatic approach here is clear, efficient and entirely on-the-nose, with little time for anything that might distract from the hagiographic effort in play. Its sole purpose is to ennoble and proclaim a hero, which its subject almost certainly is. But it makes for notably simplified drama."  

So is RBG a heroine worthy of great praise and adulation? . . .

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How Could The Times Not Realize That It Is A Laughingstock?

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At the New York Times yesterday, they devote the entire space for unsigned editorials to one piece.  You could guess the headline without my having to tell you.  It’s “Trump Imperils the Planet.”   From the sub-headline:  “[T]he administration is taking the country, and the world, backward.”   Yes, it’s not only that nobody is doing as we say on reducing emissions to “save the planet,” but IT’S ALL DONALD TRUMP’S FAULT!!!!!!.

[The recent UN climate conference in Poland] was a hugely dispiriting event and a fitting coda to one of the most discouraging years in recent memory for anyone who cares about the health of the planet — a year marked by President Trump’s destructive, retrograde policies, . . .  

But hadn’t Pravda assured us that the rest of the world would never be tricked into following Trump’s lead, but rather was going to put this retrograde idiot in his place? . . .

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Three Generations In Greenwich Village

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Three Generations In Greenwich Village

My kids seem to get a laugh out of watching some of the cheesy Hallmark Christmas movies during the holiday season. And then last week I got talking to a guy on the city bus, and he turned out to be working as one of the producers of the series. So I thought I should read up on the phenomenon. Next thing you know, I find out that these movies have a standard plot, one of the elements of which is young woman “leaving the soulless big City” to go to a small town and find love.

Soulless?? . . .

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"Prestigious" Prizes And Awards: How Progressives Buy Tribal Loyalty

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Pulitzer Prizes. Nobel Prizes. Academy Awards. These are just a handful of examples of the many, many “prestigious” prizes and awards out there, given out supposedly to award achievement and excellence at the highest level in fields like journalism, literature, science, and film.

Or are most of these awards just completely fake scams that are really given out without regard to merit or fact-checking to those who produce work that most perfectly channels the favored progressive groupthink of the moment? I’ll let you be the judge. But consider some recent events.

On December 19 an outlet called Medium published a long article with the headline “Der Spiegel journalist messed with the wrong small town.” The authors of the Medium piece are Michele Anderson and Jake Krohn, two residents of the small town of Fergus Falls, Minnesota. It seems that the German magazine Der Spiegel — the largest circulation current-affairs magazine in Europe — published a major piece in 2017 by a guy named Claas Relotius on the subject of Fergus Falls, with the headline “Where they pray for Trump on Sundays” (probably behind pay wall). The gist of Relotius’s Spiegel piece was that the residents of Fergus Falls are stupid small-town yokels, thus of course explaining their overwhelming support for Trump in the 2016 election. Anderson and Krohn took their time putting together what is one of the most incredible take-downs of a piece of journalism that I have ever seen. The result is an article organized as a “top eleven” list of total whoppers and demonstrably false statements from the Relotius piece — everything from whether Fergus Falls is in “a dark forest that looks like dragons live in it” (it’s actually on the prairie), to whether the City Administrator is a “virgin” who has “never [been] together with a woman” and “never seen the ocean” (Anderson/Krohn include a picture of the guy with his girlfriend at the ocean), to whether a certain guy has hands that are “always black” from working on a farm next to a coal power plant (the guy in question, identified by Relotius by the wrong name, actually works for UPS and does not have black hands), and on and on. Anderson and Krohn conclude: . . .

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New York City Housing Authority: Can Anyone Do Socialism Better?

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Readers of this blog know that you don’t have to travel to Venezuela or North Korea to watch socialism failing. Right here in New York City, we have the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), run in a classic socialist model consisting of public ownership, most costs covered by taxpayer subsidies, and absolutely no one who ever gets an extra nickel in their paycheck for keeping the place from falling apart. Result: costs go up and up and up, and the place is falling apart. For a few of my previous posts about NYCHA, see here, here and here.

In February 2017 I asked the eternal question, “Which Will Collapse First: North Korea Or The New York City Housing Authority?” Close to two years later, they’re still running neck and neck.

If you’re wondering if NYCHA is really falling apart, the daily newspapers will give you plenty of evidence. As just one example, here’s a report from ABC News on November 24, headline “NYCHA tenants living without heat fed up, want answers.” Excerpt:

The tenants in the Grant Houses in Harlem are suffering, and it is not even winter yet. They have frigid tap water and cold, dead radiators. "I have a right to expect heat, I have a right to expect hot water. If I have a complaint, I expect for it to be repaired," says resident Barbara Stevens. Tenants are outraged, and they're not alone. At one time or another last month, tens of thousands of apartments in the city's public housing system were without heat, hot water or both - and thousands more in the past few days alone. Comptroller Stringer is demanding answers. "This is a citywide disgrace!" he said. . . .

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