Kevin D. Williamson Has Dispatch Envy

His latest Twitter-esque snarky lukewarm take at The Corner:

Elitist at Elitist University Wins Elitist Prize

By KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

October 8, 2019 11:27 AM

That's how we're supposed to talk about this stuff now, right? Nothing good ever comes out of the Ivy League!

Oh I get it, this is "sarcasm," a very Elite form of humor that anyone can manage and which is ominpresent on the vulgar populist platform Twitter.

And this is Kevin D. Williamson telling us that he considers himself a member of "The Elite," even if no one else agrees that his white-trash one-trick-pony fatass is Elite.

From the Wall Street Journal:

The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three scientists for work advancing understanding of Earth's place in the cosmos--from the history of the universe since the Big Bang to the first discovery of a planet outside our solar system.

Canadian-American James Peebles of Princeton University was honored "for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology," with the other half of the award shared by Swiss scientists Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz "for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star," said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the prize.

Note that Kevin D. Williamson is playing the game the "I F***ing Love Science" crowd does -- by merely mentioning science, he believes himself to be self-identifying as a scientist.

But notice how very vague he is in this post. The first half of the prize was awarded to a man for "for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology" -- well, which ones, precisely, Kevin?

You don't know?

You didn't even bother to read a more substantial article to find out?

No, of course you didn't. The best part of Twitter Intellectual Signalling is the same best part of Twitter Virtue Signalling -- it requires no work whatsoever. Not even reading beyond the first two paragraphs of a blurb. You get to pretend to be a scientist just by saying I Fucking Love Science.

Goodness, look at that: a couple of dodgy Europeans and a @#$%&! immigrant at Princeton!

Oh right because conservatives are racists and hate foreigners. I get it.

They probably don’t even buy into "intelligent design," either.

Oh right because conservatives are benighted religious crazies. I get it.

Harrumph, etc.

Go fuck yourself, you bloated hugely-fat low-rent white-trash poser.

And how does this fat pasty couch-potato suggest we in the Non-Elite elevate ourselves to his elite intellectual level?

By watching more TV.

No, seriously. I often lie to you, but I'm not lying about this.

Conservatives Should Watch More Television

By KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

September 4, 2019 2:23 PM

Specifically, more drama and comedy (and less cable news)

The conservative movement in the United States, which identifies itself too closely with the Republican party, is at a low cultural ebb (it is certainly fashionable to be anti-Trump), but American popular culture for the past 20 years nonetheless has been suffused with deeply conservative sentiment -- even though conservatives often fail to understand or appreciate it. We should watch less cable news and more drama and comedy.

It may be a matter of sloganeering. The Republican party, in its current goofball-nationalist manifestation, has a four-word slogan: "Make America Great Again!" But conservatives ought instead to appreciate the three most conservative words ever spoken on the vast stage that is HBO: "Winter is coming."

...

The same phenomenon is observable all over our popular culture: Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy reimagining Batman as a kind of esoteric Straussian who (in a series beginning just a few years after 9/11) countenances torture and illegal extradition methods to protect a public that must be kept in the dark about how hard things get done, who faces off against an Eastern terrorist cult targeting New York City, an amped-up version of Occupy Wall Street, and, most famously and perhaps most immediately relevant, an unhappy loser who shows that he can shut down a city with "a couple of bullets." Or consider Skyfall, with its Royal Doulton bulldog draped in the Union Jack, its conservative organizing principles ("Sometimes the old ways are the best") and dramatic retreat to the family homestead, its unabashed invocation of "patriotism" and "love of country."

He does know that the whole plot of Skyfall was set in motion by M cynically betraying the former agent? Who was himself serving patriotically, until his government viciously betrayed him?

Not... not super-duper patriotic, really. More of a very superficial critique of patriotism and how patriotism (or any -ism) makes bastards of us all.

The Walking Dead ends up being an extended exploration of Mancur Olson's "stationary bandit" and the tensions between democracy, the rule of law, and the practical necessities of physical security -- with an ode to property rights and free trade thrown into the bargain.

This fat fuck sure can run his mouth real purty when he's making up excuses as to how watching 30 hours of TV per week is actually just a type of Continuing Education, huh?

Ah well: Every addict spends a lot of mind-hours justifying his addiction.

Breaking Bad was a reimagining of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a meditation on the seduction of evil, and it ends with the most forthright of confessions: "I did it for me. I did it because I liked it."

You know what else really sells the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? The book Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

But reading iz hard.

If a conservative social critic had tried to write a series about how to be an unhappy young woman, the result would have been something quite like Girls, or maybe Fleabag. The theme of Stranger Things is not so much "Winter is coming" but "Winter is already here, and always has been, if you know how to look."

Are their any shows this fat wife-sharer doesn't watch religiously?

And now, having gushed about his enthusiasm for current TV, let Kevin D. Williamson strum the mystic chords of memory and start talking up forty year old TV shows.

For comparison, think about the most popular and influential television shows of the middle 1970s to middle 1980s. There was one big Vietnam hangover (M*A*S*H) and a petroleum-derived soap opera (Dallas), but as the divorce epidemic of those years kicked into full swing, the tube was dominated by sentimental depictions of family life (Happy Days, Little House on the Prairie, The Waltons) and quietly terrified comedies about the awkwardness of single life (Laverne and Shirley, Three's Company), though divorce itself was rarely addressed directly: The eponymous heroine of Alice was a widow, as was Mrs. Garrett on Diff’rent Strokes and The Facts of Life; her sometime employer, Mr. Drummond, was a widower. Captain Stubing of The Love Boat was one of the relatively few prominent divorced characters. Other sexual and familial anxieties were alluded too at safe comedic arm’s length in Bosom Buddies and Three's Company.

Watch Three's Company so you can get educated about changing social mores!!!

The immediate postwar years, with the optimism of ascendance tempered by memories of war’s horrors and the privations of the Great Depression, were dominated by a few return-to-normalcy family shows (Father Knows Best, Ozzie and Harriet), a remarkable profusion of westerns, and variety programs hosted by the likes of Ed Sullivan, Jack Benny, and Milton Berle. Perry Como (of Chesterfield Supper Club) and The Lone Ranger made the leap from radio to television.

Now he's just leafing through his extensive collection of vintage TV Guides.

I can't quote the whole thing, but it's all this bad, and it's all entirely pointless. This "elite intellectual" just wants to tell you that he really, really, really, really loves watchin' TV and not satisfyin' women.

But he can't be bothered to discover what the Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded for. He wants us to know he cares very much about this, but can't be fussed about actually caring about it much.

Oh well-- maybe there'll be a special episode of Dancing With the Stars tonight that explains it. A Dance Tribute to Cosmology, maybe.

By the way, I'm looking that up myself. So far, no one in the media seems to understand what that part of the prize was actually for. Big shock.

I think it's probably about the large scale structure of the universe, and how that was determined by the conditions present shortly after the Big Bang. Specifically, how ultrasmall quantum fluctuations in the "hot dense state" (hey, that's from the Big Bang Theory theme song, so elite intellectual Kevin Williamson might really dig this) of primordial stuff resulted, after a period of cosmic inflation in which spacetime expanded rapidly, in the distribution of clusters of matter -- in huge clusters of of galaxies connected by webs, "filaments," of gas -- and large voids of near-nothingness in between.

I'll let you know when an article gets beyond telling me it's "about space or something."

The other half of the prize is easily understood -- it went to two people who identified the first exoplanet, the first planet detected outside our solar system.

Conservative Elite Intellectualizm

Mistress, may I watch "The Fall Guy" while you're on your "date" with Lance?

posted by Ace of Spades at 02:10 PM

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