A high school strategy guide that was circulated and edited by a wise clique has made its way to the internet. Follow this walkthrough to make high school the easiest four years of your life. (Note: As most campuses have no speed limit for foot traffic, it’s possible, using this guide, to finish high school in three years.)
Let’s use George Carlin image macros to sell ideas, America!
The abundance of bongs and the consequence-free collegiate bubble that repels the practical and harsh elements of reality often form the genesis of Libertarian sociopathy. Reality is a thought experiment; people and products are all numbers, and death, suffering, pain, neglect and contempt are just remainders that someone at George Mason or the University of Chicago with enough math degrees will eventually square away for good at no cost to the Libertarian explaining this.
Campus conservatives don’t seem to do much better, if for nothing more than the loss of economic-policy distinctions between them and Von Mises drones. Take this story, “College Students in Favor of Wealth Distribution Are Asked to Pass Their Grade Points to Other Students,” about a recent conservative graduate named Oliver Darcy. He and his buddies are right-wing media darlings, appearing in Andrew Breitbart’s vomit journals, in The Blaze and Townhall, as well as on birther-rapper home planet, World Net Daily.
Nothing, it seems, about Deadspin or Grantland can be discussed without amateur dramatics. A refrain that grew in intensity over the last month reached a kind of crescendo on message boards and Twitter yesterday when Deadspin printed three pieces about Grantland: “The editors and contributors of Deadspin must be consumed with a mindless, soul-eating jealousy of Bill Simmons, working for ESPN and having footnotes.” Or something. Increasingly, blog and board posters seem to assume that, in sports journalism, Grantland is The One True Gig, and all who do not hold it within their grasp wither to sightless wraiths screaming in the void.
Slate published an article last week titled, “Overrated: authors, critics and editors on ‘Great Books’ that aren’t all that great.” I don’t know the author, Juliet Lapidos, but there are two main problems with her list. First, her definition of “great books” seems at once misguided and charitable. Second, the “takedowns” are dreadfully limp and banal.
She takes issue with “several works” on the Modern Library’s Top 100 list. That list is chosen [on the basis of] publicity, sales and an insanely ridiculous voting system and absolutely nothing to do with greatness. So she’s underwhelmed by something underwhelming, which is basically saying less than nothing. If her goal is to ruffle some feathers, why attack a pigeon? Fucking go for it. Take on one of the great dead birds of literature: call Jane Austen the Judy Blume of the 19th century.
“Stop Coddling the Super Rich.” It’s about time someone said it. More touching still was the admission that many of The Super Rich are actually nice people. Whew! So many of us simply assumed, given every observable action ever, that they were sociopaths who owe as much of their success to cruelty and aggression as to insight and performance. We thought they — non-national, untouchable, controlling more wealth than many countries of the world — enjoyed and expected only the absolute best things that mankind has found for itself in its history. I admit, it is possible that, because of this mistaken impression, some of us may have harbored a shred of resentment at the mere existence of The Super Rich, believing them an affront to humanity, a stomping boot in the face of every starving, bleeding third-worlder, to every wage slave first-worlder, to every noble and brave idea of which we have ever conceived.
If yesterday you were given a magic lamp and forced to conjure Miranda July into existence, you would have asked the genie for a Diablo Cody who tries ten times as hard to say something even shallower than her current body of work. July, like Cody (who also shares the distinction of having a fake name that immediately makes you think, “Holy shit, what an obviously contrived name”), is one of few nationally recognized creative types to offer a nearly 1:1 ratio between your finding out who she is, and finding that you already loathe her.
That terrifying fellow Mobutu Sese Seko (the blog one) visits GQ.com. Among other things, your Yankees/Heat analogy is torn to shreds and fed to fat pigeon-dogs:
While the Yankees are accepted as a historical inevitability, like misunderstanding the founding fathers or making bad jokes about travel, the Patriots seem to get a pass because of football’s layers of personnel and structure—neither of which exist for the Heat. In football, signing one guy to a team can’t change the balance of a conference. Randy Moss might be a playmaker, but Darelle Revis can put him on an island. Both men serve under a pyramid of specialists and technocrats. Meanwhile, the Heat play under a coach who’s routinely reduced by fan commentary to a cipher, a poor beard for the fact that egos set the tone and ignore the sober official voices.
If you want to kill something today, read this post instead.
A collection of tweets as news broke about Bin Laden’s death, like:
• Let the word go forth from this time and place: if you are an international terrorist, you won’t get away with it for more than 17 years.
• It will only take us 9 years & 4 months & about $4 trillion in international conflicts & intelligence actions, but we’ll EVENTUALLY END YOU.
• Holy shit, all my dead friends from New York just came back to life.
World Net Daily publisher Joe Farah knows that lie aren’t bad things of themselves but rather the levers that pinheaded little journalistic shits use to hoist themselves out of the ground and spoil the sunlight with their presence. Lies are things decent people feel that it’s sometimes necessary to tell, to effect positive change that will save America, because it’s the only way heartland morons will learn better. Leo Strauss said so, and he was a conservative who taught at a liberal university anyway, so you know it has to be true. The real vermin are the people who notice lies, who ruin good things with their flashcard minds and dictionary-fondling fingers. Try this approach on your own sometime. Screw a cocktail waitress, come home stinking of her perfume and confront your wife. When she asks you what you’ve done and you say, “I played racquetball with disadvantaged children,” smile broadly. When she points out that you have a hickey on your neck, and that your upper lip and chin stink of a woman’s crotch, level a damning finger at her and say, evenly, “TATTLETALE,” then lock her out of the house. No judge would dare rule against you, because everyone knows that correcting others is a nosypants dick move.
