A Link To Comments

Astral Codex Ten continues to have a comments section that is as good a discussion as you will find anywhere. Scott Alexander reviewed David Brooks's Bobos in Paradise twenty years later, (Book Review:  First Sixth of Bobos In Paradise) finding it overdone and not fully convincing, but containing some valuable ideas.  His commenters are less kind, ripping Brooks a new one and providing some very interesting observations about America's elite class. For example, there is someone named Phil Getz. 

This has been done by keeping wealth out of the hands of people who didn't go to the right colleges, and reshaping the Democratic party in a way that made it both rich and controllable. That was done by re-creating the Democratic party as the anti-white-male party. This has no effect on white males who attend an Ivy or equivalent; they're still guaranteed a high-paying, high-prestige job. So the reforming of Ivy admissions policy, in cooperation with re-orienting the Democratic party using identity politics, has created a situation which lets the ruling wealthy elites shut out middle-class white and Asian males (including Jews) from wealth and power, and all but guarantee that those non-whites and females admitted to the Ivies will follow the party line. And it does all this in a way which focuses attention on racial and sexual discrimination, both shielding itself from charges of racial or sexual discrimination, and distracting attention from the actual, class-based discrimination.

There is more, much more.  It is strange for me to link to comments, yes, but Alexander sets this up by running these "Highlights from the Comments on..." regularly. Paul Fussell, who has been mentioned here at the prompting of Earl Wajenberg years ago, figures in a few of the discussions. Also fun was a 2004 expose of Brooks (Booboos in Paradise) that his telling anecdotes are not, in fact, true, and are sometimes the opposite of the truth.  He just makes stuff up and attaches a clever, memorable detail.