I’m such a goddamn baby. That fucking Ross Douthat beats me like a fucking drum. It’s my own goddamn fault, and I fall for it every goddamn fucking time. I go to the fucking New York Times to read Paul Krugman like a good fucking liberal and what do I see? Douthat: A Tough Season…
Search Results for: ROSS DOUTHAT
Brad DeLong, Professor of Economics and Censorship
I’m a huge fan of Brad DeLong’s “Grasping Reality with Both Hands” blog. Like Brad, I’m a pro-stimulus Krugmanite (or at least “Krugmanite-ish”) with a special interest in economic history, particularly the whole “European Miracle” thing. Unfortunately, I part company with Brad on global warming. My position is, yeah, it’s getting warmer, and it’s definitely…
Suffering white Christians, suffering at Harvard
Ross Douthat, whom I in the past have unkindly—and even perhaps unjustly—referred to as Ross Dumb Fuck—is at it again, bemoaning the suffering of white Christians, citing a study by Princeton sociologists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford for support. According to Ross, Espenshade and Radford provide “statistical confirmation for what alumni of highly selective…
There is some good in all of us, some of the time
Today is Mea Culpa day at the Literature R Us corral, when I pause to stop making vicious fun of people I generally don’t like, like Eugene “Jan. 6? Wasn’t that a Tuesday?” Volokh and Ross “Yeah, I think it was a Tuesday” Douthat because, well, because they impressed me. I’ll talk about Gene first,…
Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer”: Actually, it’s pretty dumb
Two thirds of the way through Oppenheimer, I asked myself “Why did Christopher Nolan make this picture?” Because, except for a few cheesy nits, which I will most assuredly pick later, what we have gotten, about two hours in, is essentially a pseudo documentary, a laboriously accurate, $100 million reconstruction of the events leading up…
The Benedict Strategy, Spinoza Edition
I don’t know if you’re up on Rod Dreher, who moans and groans with varying degrees of accuracy regarding the woke folks over at the American Conservative. Rod, a floridly passionate Christian, seems to have undergone several denominational makeovers, rejecting the Catholic Church to settle, I think, somewhere in the fields of Eastern Orthodoxy. Awhile…
Political Notes from All Over
Turnout, Turnout, Turnout! Why Democrats love it and Republicans hate it. Ruy Teixeira, a Democratic political centrist after my own heart, has a post up at his Substack blog, The Liberal Patriot, How Not to Build a Coalition, arguing, correctly, in my opinion, “High turnout is just not the magic key to Democratic victories the…
2020 startin’ off moist! “Conservatives” wet their pants with joy, liberals with fear, while only the hypocrites stay dry
Happy New Year, n’est-ce pas? Or, perhaps more appropriately, WTF? I’m getting too old for this shit, and I didn’t sign up for it in the first place. In the old days, like December 31, 2019, one of the harshest, and truest, charges against Vladimir Putin is that he carried out the assassination of people…
The National Review explains: “We’re not racist! We hate white winos too!
Jonathan Chait has an excellent piece at New York magazine, making the same point I did last week; Republicans aren’t waging a “war” against black voters. It’s merely a sustained, unrelenting skirmish—kind of a skirmish to the death. Jon catches the National Review with its pants, morals, and intellect at half mast, “explaining” why the…