New York native Olivia Thirlby has a fairly extensive filmography and has also appeared on stage as well as in several TV shows, but she is probably best known for her role in the 2012 remake of Dredd, where she plays Judge Cassandra Anderson, a rookie assigned to the title character for evaluation after narrowly failing the examination, since she has telepathic powers the Chief Judge thinks may be useful. In fact, her powers come in very handy as she and Dredd fight their way through a megablock to take down drug lord Ma-Ma (Lena Headley, who as we all know went on to play an even more ruthless character in Game of Thrones). Here we see Judge Anderson in a scene that does NOT appear in the movie. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.
One aspect of my personality that most people don’t usually “get” is that I am intensely competitive by nature. The reason this trait is invisible is because, over the years, I found it advantageous to conceal it. “Never let ’em see you sweat” was my philosophy, and I made a point of appearing jocular, happy-go-lucky, a clownish scatterbrain whose success was mysterious because I didn’t even seem to be trying to succeed.
This posture of fake humility (because I am, in point of fact, arrogant as all hell) was modeled after a TV character, Detective Columbo.
With his rumpled overcoat, unkempt hair, ever-present cigar and low-energy vibe, Detective Columbo did not seem like a crime-solving genius. He didn’t seem to be interrogating suspects. He was just asking questions, many of which seemed irrelevant to the murder case under investigation, and the villain would think he was going to get away with his crime up until the point where — at the end of the interview, as Columbo was about to leave — he’d say, “Just one more thing . . .”
This is what’s known in card games as “sandbagging,” underbidding your hand, luring the opponent into error with the illusion of easy victory.
What you learn from watching Detective Columbo is the value of being underestimated in any competitive situation. If you’re really good at what you do, there’s no need to brag and boast in an effort to impress people with how good you are — your work will speak for itself. And your success will be all the more enjoyable because people will be surprised when you succeed: “How did this bumbling slob of a policeman manage to solve the murder?” Meanwhile, amongst the intelligentsia . ..
The concept of “elite overproduction” has attracted a lot of attention in the past several years, and it’s not hard to see why. Most associated with Peter Turchin, a researcher who has attempted to develop models that describe and predict the flow of history, elite overproduction refers to periods during which societies generate more members of elite classes than the society can grant elite privileges. Turchin argues that these periods often produce social unrest, as the resentful elites jostle for the advantages to which they believe they’re entitled.
The key word here is “entitled.” What is involved in such an attitude of entitlement has to do with background, ambition and expectations. Most students at elite universities come from affluent backgrounds. Their parents are usually college-educated professionals, and the offspring of such families are expected to follow a similar career trajectory, to emulate and hopefully exceed their own parents’ success. Highly intelligent, they are recognized as top students at an early age, chosen for “gifted” classes in elementary school, put onto the academic fast-track of honors classes in high school, and steered toward highly selective universities — the Ivy League, Northwestern, Stanford, etc. — where merely being admitted to the freshman class is a prestigious honor.
These youth are repeatedly told by their parents and teachers, like the chorus in Greek tragedy, that there is no limit to their future achievements. Nothing is beyond their reach, they are assured, and their experience of scholastic achievement — valedictorian, admitted to a very selective university — gives them no reason to doubt this prophesy of success. Their ambition is boundless. They expect to win.
Well, the freshman class at Harvard is nearly 2,000 kids, and the freshman class at Yale is over 1,500, and there simply aren’t enough chairs at the table of Ivy League greatness to accommodate every clever freshman who wants a seat. It is proverbial that the hardest part of graduating from Harvard is getting admitted to Harvard — well over 95% of freshmen eventually get their diploma — but then what? Harvard, Yale, Duke, NYU — go on down the list of elite universities, total up their graduating classes, and you realize that the top 20 schools are cranking out something over 30,000 “elite” graduates every year. Some of them are trained in fields like engineering or banking where their degrees will automatically qualify them for lucrative employment, but what will become of the liberal arts majors? A degree in English literature from Yale is a more prestigious credential than a similar diploma from a second-tier state university, but it’s still not a coupon that can be automatically redeemed for a big house and a new car.
Elite graduates have won a series of academic competitions — for top grades in high school, then for admission to top universities — which are supposed to qualify them for success, but the competition that actually matters doesn’t begin until after you get your diploma and go out into that terra incognita that undergrads call “the Real World.”
This is where the problem of “elite overproduction” becomes apparent. Every competition produces winners and losers, and many of the people we may think of as winners in the game of life are actually haunted by feelings of disappointment. They haven’t achieved as much as they hoped to achieve in their youth, or their success has been overshadowed by the even greater achievements of their former classmates, or their own success just isn’t as emotionally satisfying as they might wish.
Elite overproduction has been on my mind because of a condition that, I find, grows more acute over time: the sense that many people, particularly the college-educated and the financially secure, are deeply unsatisfied with their status in society. It’s impossible to quantify these feelings, but I think many would agree with me about a pervasive sense of discontent among people who have elite aspirations and who feel that their years toiling in our meritocratic systems entitles them to fulfill those aspirations. Recent political upheaval has given voice to this unhappiness. I personally am a supporter of a new economic system and the socialist movements that began with Occupy Wall Street. But I also recognize the influence of elite overproduction in those movements; an essential part of their genesis was when graduates of top colleges found themselves unable to get the jobs they thought they deserved after the financial crisis. That anger has only spread and intensified since.
My son Jim was a teenager working construction jobs in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, and found his services in demand, as banks had repossessed a lot of houses that they wanted to re-sell. Jim worked for a contractor whose specialty was doing the kind of renovations that helped make these houses more marketable — upgrading the kitchen and bathrooms, installing new floors, etc. So while “graduates of top colleges” were rioting because they couldn’t “get the jobs they thought they deserved,” my son with a high school diploma was getting overtime hours rehabbing the houses that those college graduates couldn’t afford to buy. The irony is delicious, but the key point is about expectations — people with prestigious degrees expect certain things, and believe they deserve to have what they expect, and this is the source of the “discontent” to which deBoer refers. His observations about the political influence of such discontent are related to what Eric Hoffer observed in The True Believer in the section about “potential converts” to mass movements:
The permanent misfits are those who because of a lack of talent or some irreparable defect in mind or body cannot do the one thing for which their whole being craves. No achievement, however spectacular, in other fields can give them a sense of fulfillment. . . .
The most incurably frustrated — and, therefore, the most vehement — among the permanent misfits are those with an unfulfilled craving for creative work.
Creative employment is uniquely valued in our culture, and I have noted an ambient anger about who gets to be a part of it. As someone who’s able to make a comfortable living as a writer, I often come into contact with people who are resentful that they haven’t been afforded the same opportunity. (I try to remind them that, under capitalism, success does not spring simplistically from talent and work ethic.) This resentment also exists in film, television, music… There have never been more people trying to make it professionally through the creation of art and culture, but success remains as elusive as ever.
On one hand, the 21st century would seem to be a strange time for people to feel artistically unfulfilled. After all, never in the history of the world has the capacity to create and reach an audience been more readily or cheaply available. The tools and platforms available for creative expression are vast, varied, and largely free to use. Many of those platforms are home to large audiences. . . .
Think about this. If you’re a musician, there are so many tools available now to help you produce quality recordings at home, and it is so easy to upload your music to Spotify, to create videos and upload them to YouTube, that there can be no excuse for your lack of success. You can no longer say, as frustrated musicians used to do, that you got mishandled by management or screwed over by your recording label. In the 21st-century music world, success is entirely up to you, and this fact only adds to the resentment felt by people who end up as losers in the competition.
What accounts for the self-inflicted misery of the “elites” is their sense of entitlement, the belief that they deserve success and happiness, the expectation that they should win every game they choose to play, which in turn leads them into an envious resentment of anyone who possesses anything that they covet. Think of the absurdity in the fact that Freddie deBoer is an object of envy to his would-be “writer” acquaintances.
It’s not like Freddie is sitting in the lap of luxury, feted at cocktail soirees, flying off to Aspen or Paris to speak at swanky conferences. He has merely found a niche that affords him what he considers a “comfortable living” as an essayist and — as I’m sure he is aware, although his envious acquaintances might not have figured it out — it took him years of patient toil to reach that level of comfort. Fifteen years ago, his living was not nearly so “comfortable,” as he was a mere spare-time blogger with a day job teaching school, but he stuck with it long enough to accumulate a substantial readership, which he was then able to monetize when Substack became a thing. He is the Detective Columbo of political/culture essayists, you might say, a rumpled-coat writer who “won” the competition by dogged determination. “Just one more thing . . .”
What accounts for the spoiled-child tantrums of so many of these “elite” types? The shouting-down of Judge Kyle Duncan at Stanford Law School — what caused that? You can say that “woke” ideology is to blame, but why are law students at Stanford so vulnerable to “wokeness”? Why was it so easy to persuade these elite students that they are victims of oppression, merely because someone disagrees with them?
Most obviously, (a) they weren’t spanked as children, but also (b) they weren’t taught proper sportsmanship. A tough-minded attitude — the ability to maintain one’s poise when suffering the pain of defeat — used to be drilled into the minds of boys: Nobody cares about your hurt feelings.
Our coaches were generally men who had lived through the Depression, and who had fought in World War II or Korea, and they understood what real suffering was. They also understood that the games we were playing were about preparing us for the duties of manhood, which require the ability to endure hardship. Certainly they did not tolerate any boohooing over mere hurt feelings and, indeed, we were taught to sustain physical injury without complaint. “Walk it off” was the general instruction to any player who twisted an ankle or whatever, and I’m sure many of my teammates kept playing despite injuries that nowadays would have had them rushed off to the emergency room for an ultrasound.
Never will I forget the time my nose got busted in a youth football game and I ran to the sidelines with the blood pouring down my face, signaling Coach Chuck Starnes to send in a substitute. Coach Starnes grabbed my jersey, pulled it up and roughly rubbed the blood off my face with it, then yelled: “Now, get back in there!” And so I did, without complaint.
Nearly all adults had that kind of attitude when I was kid. Parents, teachers, coaches — all of them came from hard times, and when they dished out the punishment, we had no choice but to accept it. You couldn’t treat kids that way nowadays without being investigated by the Department of Family Services, but the current regime of mandatory mollycoddling hasn’t improved the lives of young people; on the contrary, the abandonment of corporal punishment has rendered many young people incapable of coping with the unavoidable reality of adulthood, namely that life is a competition, and it takes mental toughness to succeed in any competitive endeavor. The whiny brats at Stanford, who claimed to be suffering “harm” merely because Judge Duncan had been invited to speak on campus, are symptomatic of this lack of mental toughness. Any emotionally healthy young adult ought to be able to tolerate disagreement, but the Stanford Law students who disrupted the judge’s speech are not emotionally healthy. They are sick — warped by privilege, accustomed to having their whims indulged — and unfit for the responsibilities of adult life. What they need is the rough hand of a Coach Starnes to teach them: Nobody cares about your hurt feelings.
In any properly ordered educational institution, the students should never be guaranteed success. The possibility of failure or expulsion is necessary to prevent the sort of puerile misbehavior that the spoiled “elite” students at Stanford Law demonstrated last week. You want to be part of the “elite”? By God, boy, you’d better act the part, then, or else you’re going to get kicked out to make your way in the world without that “elite” diploma to which you think you’re entitled.
After all, if “elite overproduction” is a problem, these whiny brats are not really such precious human commodities. We have a surplus of these emotionally vulnerable young whiners, and universities ought not hesitate to expel them if they can’t behave themselves. Sometimes the solution is so obvious, the intelligentsia can’t see it.
This week’s SOTD is from the soundtrack to the James Caan movie Thief, one of the movies directed by Michael Mann that eventually earned him a shot at making Miami Vice. It’s a dark movie about an ex-con jewel thief trying to go straight who gets dragged back into crime by the Chicago mob. The last track, “Igneous”, was used in the trailer for The Warriors. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.
How is it that you get yourself elected to Congress and appointed to an important committee, but can’t be bothered to familiarize yourself with the subject matter of a major hearing? If the voters of the 29th District of Texas have any capacity for reflection — notice the word “if” in that phrase — they should be wondering what the hell Rep. Sylvia Garcia was doing last week instead of preparing for the Judiciary subcommittee hearing in which Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified about their “Twitter files” reporting. Look at that screen shot: Do you see Garcia scrutinizing her notes, which were probably prepared for her by some 26-year-old staffer? Garcia is 72 years old, and perhaps she doesn’t spend much time on Twitter. She’s a busy woman, and doesn’t have time to follow every little spat on social media. We can understand that.
What is less understandable is that Garcia doesn’t know who Bari Weiss is. This became obvious when Garcia was questioning Shellenberger — an environmental journalist who has recently gotten fed up with his “progressive” comrades — about how he got involved with Twitter:
“In… in your discussion — in your answer, you also said that you were invited by a friend, Bari Weiss?” Garcia asked, already sounding confused, as if she had no idea what she was even questioning the witnesses about.
“My friend, Bari Weiss,” Shellenberger repeated for clarity.
“So this friend works for Twitter? Or, what is, what is her, ummm—” “She’s a journalist,” Taibbi explained, much to the irritation of Garcia, who probably should have known who Bari Weiss was before participating in the hearing.
“Sir, I didn’t ask you a question,” Garcia snapped. “I’m now asking Mr. Shellenberger a question.”
At this point, Taibbi and Shellenberger both start to laugh. I suspect they were more than just a little amused at Garcia’s cluelessness regarding the subject matter she was questioning them about.
“Yes, ma’am, Bari Weiss is a journalist,” Shellenberger interjected.
“I’m sorry, sir,”
“She’s a journalist,” Shellenberger repeated.
“She’s a journalist, so you work in concert with her?”
It was a rather dumb question, but Shellenberger eventually, after pondering it for a few seconds, responded in the affirmative.
“Do you know when she first, uhhh, was contacted by Mr. Musk?” Garcia asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know,” she echoed. “So you’re in this as a threesome?”
With a straight face, Congresswoman Garcia asked if Taibbi, Shellenberger & Bari Weiss are in a threesome. ?pic.twitter.com/t9rkEM1npA
Bari Weiss is certainly not an obscure figure, but maybe Garcia can’t figure out how to use Google to find a Wikipedia page.
Like her Democratic colleagues on the subcommittee, Garcia seemed to be trying to promote a narrative that there must be some kind of sinister conspiracy behind the production of the “Twitter files” stories, so that by questioning how Taibbi and Shellenberger became involved, she was “exposing” something relevant. In fact, of course, this was just a diversion, a way of trying to deflect and distract attention from the content of what Taibbi and Shellenberger have reported about how government agencies pressured Twitter to censor and suppress information on the platform. Trump Derangement Syndrome has destroyed whatever modicum of good sense Democrats ever had.
Ed Driscoll quotes Taibbi talking about how Brooklyn Rep. Dan Goldman — viewed as a “rising star” in his party — spent part of his allotted time in the committee trying to claim that mere accusations of “Russian interference” made by former special counsel Robert Mueller are tantamount to proof of such interference:
The irony is that what Goldman was doing, confusing accusations with proof — as Thomas Jefferson said, the phenomenon of people whose “suspicions may be evidence” — was the entire reason for the hearing. Michael and I were trying to describe a system that wants to bypass proof and proceed to punishment, a radical idea that this new breed of Democrat embraces. I think they justify this using the Sam Harris argument, that in pursuit of suppressing Trump, anything is justified. But by removing or disrespecting the rights to which Americans are accustomed, you make opposition movements like Trump’s, you don’t stop them.
Which is to say, “If you want more Trump, this is how you get more Trump.” This danger seems to be invisible to Democrats, as Taibbi suggests. How is it that we can see it, but they can’t? The former FBI director filed indictments against 12 named members of Russian military intelligence, asserting that they “engaged in a sustained effort to hack into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, and the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, and released that information on the internet under the names ‘DCLeaks’ and ‘Guccifer 2.0’ and through another entity.” Maybe this actually happened, but (a) the indictment does not prove that it happened, besides which (b) any prosecutor can proverbially “indict a ham sandwich,” and also rather conveniently (c) there has not been, nor is there ever likely to be, an actual arrest and trial in such a case, because (d) Russia is never in a million years going to turn over their intelligence agents to U.S. law enforcement.
But don’t bother citing facts or arguing logic to Democrats. They have their beliefs — “Russian collusion” is as important to their belief system as the resurrection of Jesus is to Christianity — and any effort to dissuade them of this political theology is a waste of time and energy.
How many times do I have to repeat myself? I keep saying Crazy People Are Dangerous and yet, despite my warnings, the craziness continues.
The SPLC refers to the “Sovereign Citizens Movement,” but since when is psychosis a political agenda? Nevertheless, I’ll quote the SPLC:
The contemporary sovereign belief system is based on a decades-old conspiracy theory. Sovereigns believe that the American government set up by the founding fathers, under a common-law legal system, was secretly replaced. They think the replacement government swapped common law for admiralty law, which is the law of the sea and international commerce.
Some sovereigns believe this perfidious change occurred during the Civil War, while others blame the events of 1933, when the U.S. abandoned the gold standard. Either way, they stake their lives and livelihoods on the idea that U.S. judges and lawyers, who they believe are foreign agents, know about this hidden government takeover but argue against it, denying the sovereigns’ motions and filings out of treasonous loyalty to hidden and malevolent government forces.
These people are daft, deranged, demented, berserk, bonkers, off their rockers, a few fries short of a Happy Meal and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.
“Sovereign citizen ideology . . . experienced a resurgence in popularity during the pandemic,” it is claimed, and as to why this “resurgence” happened, probably it’s because emotionally vulnerable people had lots of spare time and drifted into the murkier corners of the web. Finding themselves immersed in decentralized fringe ecosystems—whether they were day-trading obscure altcoins or skirting traditional banking oversight to gamble on offshore tether casinos—these folks inevitably fell down algorithmic rabbit holes. Once primed to distrust the system, they started binge-watching YouTube videos by kooks who told them, “Naw, you don’t need no driver’s license! Don’t need none of them tags on your truck, neither! It’s the global elites trying to control you with their so-called ‘traffic laws’!” This is what it always seems to come down to — cops pull over a guy with a bogus tag on his car, and the guy claims he doesn’t have to answer any questions, etc.
Why traffic laws? Answer me this question. Of all the legislation on the books to which anyone might conceivably object, why is it that these “sovereign citizens” decide they’re going to rebel against allegedly corrupt authorities by disregarding traffic laws? Could the craziness of this “movement” be any more self-evident? I don’t think so.
This is what Chase Allan of Farmington, Utah, looked like before he got all wacko with this “sovereign citizen” nonsense, which led directly to his death last week:
Allan, 25, was pulled over in the parking lot of the Farmington post office March 1 after an officer noticed an illegitimate license plate on the back of his car, which was not registered. At the time, it was considered a routine traffic stop, Farmington police Chief Eric Johnsen has said.
In the body camera footage released during a police news conference Wednesday, Allan can be heard telling the officer who approaches his car, “I don’t need registration and I don’t answer questions.” The officer then called for backup, and four more officers headed to the scene.
Police have said Allan initially refused to provide any identification to the officer and “asserted his independence from the laws of the land.”
In the footage, Allan can be heard saying he is “not giving [the officer] jurisdiction” over him, adding that the officer is not allowed to stop him. Allan can be seen holding up his phone during the traffic stop, appearing to record the officer as they interact.
The body camera footage shows Allan eventually hand the officer his passport, but he does not provide a driver license. After backup arrives at the scene, an officer orders Allan to step out of the vehicle, but he refuses, stating that he is “not required to.”
As police again order Allan to step out of the car, Allan can be heard saying, “If you try and force me, then we’re going to have an issue.”
“If you don’t step out of the car, then we’re going to break the window and pull you out,” an officer can be heard replying.
Seconds after that reply, officers appear to force Allan’s driver’s side door open, the footage shows. Almost immediately, as an officer leans over Allan, an officer can be heard shouting that Allan has a gun.
A barrage of gunfire can then be heard in the footage, as officers open fire for about five seconds while simultaneously stepping away from the vehicle, the footage shows.
You can click here to watch the whole video. I sent it to one of my sons in a text message, saying the “sovereign citizen” died in a hail of gunfire — as they all should. Which is both (a) my habitual sarcasm, but also (b) actually true. I mean, if armed kooks are going to drive around with no tags on their cars and start trouble whenever the cops pull them over, this craziness is basically self-inflicted genocide. And guess what?
NOBODY’S GOING TO LOOT WALMART IN YOUR HONOR.
White people getting shot by cops? Nobody cares. Ben Crump ain’t going to show up and “demand justice.” You’re white, you f**ked with the cops, now you’re dead, and nobody cares. This idiot Chase Allan is every bit as dead as George Floyd, but white people aren’t tearing down statues or smashing windows downtown. CNN’s not going 24/7 with updates on the story. Joe Biden isn’t commenting. None of the things are happening that would have happened if Chase Allan was black. There’s some kind of lesson here, and what is that lesson? Crazy People Are Dangerous
Last month, after special teams captain Matthew Slater announced he would return for his 16th season, fans hoped that this would encourage McCourty — nicknamed “DMac” — to give it another year, but alas, age 35 is ancient by NFL standards, and I guess McCourty felt he needed to hang up the cleats while he was still healthy. Probably this means the Patriots will need to make an offer to cornerback Jonathan Jones, who is a free agent this year and, at age 29, is one of the more senior defensive backs on the New England roster. If DMac had been willing to play another year, perhaps the Patriots could have stood losing Jones, but now? Nah — pay the man, Bill. And, of course, this will affect New England’s priorities in the draft next month. I’d prefer them to take either of Alabama’s safeties — Brian Branch or Jordan Battle — because you can never have too much ’Bama on your roster. At any rate, the secondary will need reinforcements now, although it’s really impossible to replace a veteran leader like McCourty. Best wishes, DMac!
Here is #Patriots HC Bill Belichick's statement on Devin McCourty's retirement:
"It is a rare group of players who win games at a historic rate, exude team culture, lead, win awards, and win championships, and then there is Devin McCourty. Devin did all of those things…" pic.twitter.com/0fZhizvRKD
