It just had to happen… I just had to stumble on ’nother row o’ dumb articles, & this time from our ol’ friends, The Atlantic, who took time off jerking themselves off o’er the dead bodies o’ Ukrainians to write 5 mo’ shitty news articles. Get out your tier-list cards. Here are the contenders that jumped out @ me while reading some random article I don’t remember:

The 1st 1 I saw already makes me hurl just @ the title & excerpt: “The One Witness at the January 6 Hearing Who Matters Most” & then below that we get the answer: “It’s you”. ¡Boo! ¡Get the fuck outta here! Considering all I did was make lame cum jokes while watching it — tho still, depressingly ’nough, better than the jokes most o’ the rest o’ the internet was making @ the time — ’cause nothing intelligent was said during it, I doubt that.

That this article is written by the same fascist Bush lackey who wrote his inane “Axis of Evil” 2002 State of the Union address, where Bush, in typical Republican projectionism, had the audacity o’ claiming the 21st century version o’ Poland for the US to illegally invade was the equivalent o’ an axis power for having a dictator that the US fervently supported while he was doing his worst war crimes, makes this the greatest o’ farces. I would love to ask Sir Frum what his take on the original “Stop the Count” by the Brooks Brothers to help his former employer steal his 1st election. Then ’gain, no I wouldn’t, ’cause it’d be inane as e’erything else this mediocre Goebbels has e’er written.

We can see this thru this very article, where Frum strings simple sentences, 1 after the other, since Frum ne’er graduated elementary school & ne’er learned such arcane esoterica as a subordinate clause:

The fatalism was always wrong. The important thing to remember about the Trump presidency is that he was beaten again, and again, and again. His protective congressional majority was stripped away in 2018. He was twice tainted by impeachment. He was defeated for re-election. His conspiracy to overturn that president election defeat was thwarted.

’Cept ’course the fact that he took control o’ the supreme court, which have unilateral power to defeat laws or e’en create laws based on what arbitrary interpretation they make up from the constitution, & Trumpists are taking o’er key local governments that are able to pass laws that mess round with the electoral system. There’s a reason people keep comparing 1/6 to the Beer Hall Putsch: if you fail a coup & don’t suffer consequences, try, try ’gain.

But if there is one lesson to take from the Trump years, it’s not the cynical Twitter joke “LOL nothing matters.”

I, WHO AM DEFINITELY A HUMAN BEING & NOT A FLESHY DROID, KNOW HOW THE YOUNG HUMAN PEOPLE TALK. THEY SAY LOL IN ALL CAPS & SAY NOTHING MATTERS LIKE THAT METALLICA SONG.

Now the world will know the full truth.

This was wrong. We learned only shit e’eryone already knew already.

So here’s where you come back into the story. The greatest theorists of American government have again and again warned against the delusion that the Constitution is some self-balancing mechanism, “a machine that would go of itself.” People make that machine go: people who make good choices or bad ones, people who are active or who are passive when their country needs them. People like you. You.

Awesome, since I’m the one who gets to say, I say we throw ’way the constitution & replace it with 1 that wasn’t thrown together @ the last second, just as Thomas Jefferson would’ve wanted, since it’s forced ’pon the public gainst their will & its imbecilic 2nd amendment is currently the greatest cause for the mass shootings that massacre children every few weeks.

The recently defeated president of the United States tried to overturn the Constitution rather than accept the outcome of an election. Brave and patriotic people stood up and stopped him at the time. Brave and patriotic people are seeking to hold him to account now.

The American public didn’t do shit — they ne’er do shit, ’cause they’re lazy & useless. In fact, polls show Trump’s approval ratings are higher than Biden’s, e’en after the committee.

So, yes, lol on the idea that Americans sitting on their fat asses & watching a government play will stop fascism from happening & lol on the idea that Americans, who have always been fascist, including war-criminal-collaborator David Frum ( who, I know, is Canadian — but they have fascists, too ), are going to do anything to stop it any mo’ than the average German did anything to stop the rise o’ the Nazis. David Frum should be grateful Americans have been thinking “lol, nothing matters” for the past few decades or else they might’ve guillotined him as well as his empire-building boss, as they rightfully deserve. It’s not fatalism when you call your fellow American out like you fucking see them ( specially when I know that in the long, long run Englesist Magical Socialism will rise from the ashes o’ fascism, since we’ll all be dead, & the Zombie Marx will rule — bet you thought I forgot ’bout that ol’ running gag, ¿didn’t you? ).

& lol on The Atlantic pretending like they’re liberals while letting war-criminal-collaborator fascists write for their rag.

I love how my quickly-scrabbled-out rant had mo’ sources cited ( Frum’s had none ) & was better written, despite using dumbass ampersands ’stead o’ the word “and” & writing like I’m an Irish Shakespearean gang member, & am stoned while writing this. Turns out the “smart approach to marijuana” is to write shitty. Should’ve smoked up — would’ve thought o’ something much cleverer than this glorified hallmark card. If Frum had turned this article into my high school he wouldn’t gotten a D @ best.

& this fucker has the god damn gall to pretend like Marcel Proust is his favorite writer, as if he e’er read his magnum opus. Get the fuck outta here. ¿Who you trying to fool here?

This entire article was nothing but “nihilism bad, America good”, but wasted several paragraphs reiterating this point in basic sentences. It’s hard to imagine writing a worse article.

Tier: F

Next we have “How San Francisco Became a Failed City”, which is strange, since I know people who live there, & it seems to be doing pretty well. In fact, those fuckers brag to me ’bout how it’s not raining in the middle o’ June there. Well, sucks to be them — I like the rain, give me all that shit, pour your misery down on me.

This article is a bunch o’ concern-trolling by some boomer ’bout how c-c-crazy far-left San Francisco is ’cause they don’t have ’nough people getting the shit beat o’ them by pigs. They do what many boring-ass boomers do & pretend like they grew up so left-wing, but then they rebelled not by being actually clever or unique, but by just going e’en mo’ backward ’stead o’ e’en mo’ forward, as if that takes any extra braincells, & in the process, only prove what ol’-fashioned, reactionary boomers they are. For fuck’s sake, they think helping homeless people is radical left, when it’s decades ol’, guillotining people is the new radical left trend. Get with the times. Christians now help homeless people, & when they start doing shit, you know you’re not radical anymo’, ’less you’re Thousand Foot Krutch.

My grandmother’s favorite insult was to call someone dull. I learned young that it was impolite to point when a naked man passed by, groceries in hand. If someone wanted to travel by unicycle or be a white person with dreadlocks or raise a child communally among a group of gays or live on a boat or start a ridiculous-sounding company, that was just fine. Between the bead curtains of my aunt’s house, I learned you had to let your strangeness breathe.

Your grandmother was referring to you, ’cause if you think this try-hard quirkiness is strange in the slightest you are as dull as butter knives. I love how this idea wastes several paragraphs telling me their life story, only for their life story to be that they’re 1 o’ a million mediocre bougie losers. Nobody fucking cares; get to the point.

It was always weird, always a bit dangerous. Once, when I was very little, a homeless man grabbed me by the hair, lifting me into the air for a moment before the guy dropped me and my dad yelled. For years I told anyone who would listen that I’d been kidnapped.

Add that to shitthatdidnthappen.txt.

If he ever got to heaven, Herb Caen, the town’s beloved old chronicler, once said, he’d look around and say, “It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.”

O my god, ¡nobody fucking cares! ¡This is fucking dreck!

All o’ this shallow detail is a desperate attempt to prove that they’re totally not 1 o’ those conservatives in the red states; they totally love San Francisco & its “strangeness”, so long as the gross poor people get sent to jail for their disgusting poorness. Rather than priming me to see them as level-headed & balanced for their ability to appreciate “lefty” things so long as they serve their particular bougie amusement, I’m left repelled by what a self-centered douche this writer is.

When they finally focus on something other than their terrible life story, they get to the point: Chesa Boudin sucks dick ’cause he’s too left-wing. We see a perfect example o’ this in lush detail wherein the writer describes their disgust in seeing druggies in the open, with, like, syringes & food. Wow, that’s so much worse than kids getting shot up or people going to jail for life for stealing hedge clippers or black people getting murdered e’ery year. This is why I can’t e’en empathize with right-wingers: they’re so fucking lame. ¡Nobody cares ’bout your baby problems! O, no, you had to look @ a boy wearing a skirt. Sorry I didn’t let you pick out my wardrobe, assholes. Only the most boring fucking loser would care. All this person succeeded in doing is ensuring that nobody will e’er invite them to a rave ’cause they’re fucking bummers who’ll probably narc to the popo — & nobody likes them.

A couple of years ago, this was an intersection full of tourists and office workers who coexisted, somehow, with the large and ever-present community of the homeless. I’ve walked the corner a thousand times. Now the homeless—and those who care for the homeless—are the only ones left.

Good. Homeless people are cooler than office workers & tourists are fucking parasites.

During the first part of the pandemic, San Francisco County lost more than one in 20 residents—myself among them.

(Laughs). I had no idea this article was written by a ghost.

It’s too bad San Francisco was the only place in the whole world to have COVID.

Funny ’nough, later on this same idiot will complain ’bout schools in San Francisco taking too long to open, so apparently this writer is fine with children dying o’ COVID so long as there’s no “learning loss” for children too dumb to read books on their own, ’cause s’posedly “ventilation” will cure that right up, right ’long with Alex Jones’s special juice.

The city’s schools were shut for most of the 2020–21 academic year—longer than schools in most other cities, and much longer than San Francisco’s private schools. In the middle of the pandemic, with no real reopening plan in sight, school-board meetings became major events, with audiences on Zoom of more than 1,000. The board didn’t have unilateral power to reopen schools even if it wanted to—that depended on negotiations between the district, the city, and the teachers’ union—but many parents were appalled to find that the board members didn’t even seem to want to talk much about getting kids back into classrooms. They didn’t want to talk about learning loss or issues with attendance and functionality. It seemed they couldn’t be bothered with topics like ventilation. Instead they wanted to talk about white supremacy.

Funny how this writer complains so much ’bout all the money given to the filthy homeless, but wants to waste extra money on maintaining school infrastructure rather than have kids stay @ home & do e’erything they need to do just as well ’cause you don’t need to be physically near each other to read books & hear other people talk. & before you say “but kids need to be physically near each other to interact”: you are a fucking ol’-ass boomer who is irrelevant to the 21st century; no children nowadays communicate thru meatspace, but entirely thru the digital realm, e’en when physically in school. This is precisely why ol’ losers like this shouldn’t be deciding policy “for the good o’ children” they don’t e’en fucking know.

Anyway, after this writer freaks out ’bout seeing a naked child — ’cause, as per Kurt Cobain, they’re a closet pedophile — & failing to get a police officer to give a shit, they spew some anecdotal evidence o’ drugs doing what drugs normally do & blame the lack o’ police officers to beat the shit out o’ druggies, which will magically make them not do drugs anymo’. Red states have that & are still swarming with opiates. If your city’s only problem is 700 out o’ 800,000 people dying o’ drug use in 1 year, your city’s doing pretty fucking well.

Funny ’nough, according to the American Addictions Center, San Francisco is 1 o’ the top 10 cities with the least o’erall drug use. But don’t let actual statistics & facts get in the way o’ this writer’s melodrama.

This whole obsession with needing mo’ police is funny, given they admit this statistic:

You can spend days debating San Francisco crime statistics and their meaning, and many people do. It has relatively low rates of violent crime, and when compared with similarly sized cities, one of the lowest rates of homicide. But what the city has become notorious for are crimes like shoplifting and car break-ins, and there the data show that the reputation is earned. Burglaries are up more than 40 percent since 2019. Car break-ins have declined lately, but San Francisco still suffers more car break-ins—and far more property theft overall—per capita than cities like Atlanta and Los Angeles.

’Gain: if shoplifting, which doesn’t e’en affect anyone who isn’t rich, & car burglaries — anyone who owns a car is a polluting asshole, specially in a tightly-packed city where just ’bout anything you need is just down the street & there’s perfectly good public transit, & the world is made a better place if car-owners are harassed into no longer using their planet-killing machines — is the worst problem your city has, you’re doing pretty OK.

Because it turns out that people on the left also own property, and generally believe stores should be paid for the goods they sell.

Sorry, let me fix this:

Because it turns out that people on the left I also own property, and generally believe stores should be paid for the goods they sell.

Also, leftists don’t believe in property: they believe Property Is Theft™.

The rage against Boudin was related to that locked-up soap, but it went far beyond it.

Bougie motherfuckers are raging ’cause they have to ask for an attendant to get soap. I want you to note the amazing capitalist innovation that this soft-on-crime law has created: rather than rely on violent state force, which inconveniences both them & the criminal, whose life is ruined ’cause their dumb ass decided to shoplift soap, when they should’ve just refused to leave the premises & stunk up the store so that customers leave in droves till the shop owner begs them to take some free soap & use it, the shop adds security, which protects their wares just as well as the police — better, in fact, since there’s no risk o’ the glass shooting you or ignoring your calls for help ’cause they have mo’ important things to do than fight soap thieves — & prevents a thief from being a thief without ruining their future potential. ¿But who cares ’bout that when this Karen has to do 1 extra thing to get soap?

The Atlantic’s so fucking lazy they couldn’t e’en proofread their captions: 1 o’ them says “Students outside of Lowell high schol”. I think e’eryone @ The Atlantic needs to go back to schol.

( Also, “outside of” in this situation is redundant & awkward: just say “outside Lowell” ).

Anyway, back to the school shit, ’cause I can’t stomach a bunch o’ landowners whining ’bout how best to utilize their plantations with the NIMBY-YIMBY-BIMBY shit. Spoiler: they try to pretend that some rich asshole buying up land for houses & slumlording o’er people is the cure to homelessness. How homeless people would be able to afford this rent is a mystery; but one would be delusional to think this writer actually has solutions to problems other people have, when homeless people & school children are just fodder for this rich asshole to complain ’bout how lefties inconvenienced them.

Anyway, after some bullshit ’bout how black people are the real racists for complaining ’bout white supremacy & ’cause 1 black person said something racist gainst Asians — ’cause white people are ne’er racist gainst Asians — we get to the improvements:

But Breed was angry, disappointed with the progressive faction and how it had let the city down. A few months earlier, Breed had announced a new approach to crime, starting with the Tenderloin, whose streets and sidewalks are full of fentanyl’s chaos. She declared it to be in a state of emergency and approved three months of funding for increased law enforcement there.

The order was mostly symbolic—the drug problem isn’t limited to a few bad blocks. Often a sweep of the homeless just means pushing the tents and dealers down the road. And anyone who lives in San Francisco knows the Tenderloin has been an emergency for years. But it allowed the mayor to trot out some new rhetoric: “What I’m proposing today and what I will be proposing in the future will make a lot of people uncomfortable, and I don’t care.” It was time, she said, to be “less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city.”

For those not paying attention: that “bullshit” that we shouldn’t “tolerate” is homeless people. How the police will magic them ’way is a mystery — the could always kill them, ’course. Probably they’ll be sent to jail, which will cost mo’ tax $s — tho that could be offset with a li’l slave labor — but that’s a price worth paying so this Karen won’t have to look @ groddy people.

& then they summarize this article in the best way:

The other day I walked by Millennium Tower. Once a symbol of the push to transform our funky town into a big city, it’s a gleaming 58-story skyscraper in the heart of San Francisco, and it’s been sinking into the ground—more than a foot since it was finished in 2009. A group of men in hard hats was just standing there, staring up at it. The metaphor is obvious, but San Francisco has never been a subtle city. I’d like to believe those guys finally had a plan to fix the tower. At least they seemed to accept that it needed fixing.

Ayn Rand’s grand Atlas is sinking thanks to dirty poor people, & now John Galt has returned to lift it back up & drive ’way all the undesireables.

This article did have some statistics, e’en if manipulated & taken out o’ context, & missing relevant statistics. ’Course, it’s worse than useless for gaining any information, as it’s essentially dishonest; but if we set our standards so high that an article needs to @ bare-minimum be educational in some way all The Atlantic articles will be F-tier, so we have to lower our standards a bit. This article also had some sentence variance, so it’s not as brain-damaged as Frum’s opus ’bove. But it’s way too long & full o’ irrelevant detail & I think I hate Frum a li’l less than this writer. Frum is just brain damaged; this writer is a legit asshole. It’s hard to believe a legit war-criminal-collaborating fascist is mo’ likeable than a harmless Karen, but that’s how it is.

Tier: D

OK, next we have “Mike Pence Is an American Hero — ¡No! ¡No! ¡No! ¿Didn’t you hear the president?: the bipartisan solution is to hang him.

Here is another idea the committee might consider: Take a moment to praise Mike Pence.

All right, here: he is not 24/7 a walking bag o’ toxic waste. ¿You happy now?

Congress can name a building in his honor.

“Congress hereby declares this the National Mike Pence Outhouse”.

The House and Senate could propose nonpartisan resolutions recognizing Pence for his service to democracy.

This is fucking stupid. Mike Pence is a “hero” ’cause he wasn’t a criminal. Yes, normalizing insurrection by treating the refusal to participate in such insurrection not as one’s duty as a lawful citizen, but as a bonus makes perfect sense. While you’re @ it, ¿why don’t I get a building named after me ’cause I don’t shoot up a school? ¿Doesn’t that make me a hero? ¿Did not most o’ the US government refuse to cooperate with Trump’s great heist? ¿Do they not all deserve buildings named after them? ¿Why should Mike Pence get a special reward for being 1 o’ the “good” Republicans, while Democrats get shit, ’cause we just expect them to not be insurrectionists? Any economist will tell you that that’s a good way to encourage people to be bad in the long run by treating bad actions equally as good — which is exactly why centrists are 100% to blame for the toxicity o’ the Republican party by enabling them by refusing to treat them as worse than Democrats, thereby encouraging them to get worse & worse, since they’ll always be treated as equally as bad as Democrats, no matter how bad they get, which is something leftists have been warning ’bout for years & only now have centrists begun to realize it.

He should have been much more aggressive in repudiating Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election.

So, he did less than what the average Democrat does, but deserves a better reward. This is logic in The Atlantic’s tiny brain.

Democrats ought to be trying to pry these voters away from the Republican Party in the event that Trump runs again. By making it clear that the Democratic Party appreciates Mike Pence as a hero of democracy—and that GOP lawmakers do not—they might just persuade a small but crucial percentage of these Pence Republicans to cross over in 2024.

This is so unbelievably stupid, I refuse to believe the person who wrote this isn’t a Republican troll — in fact, considering he wrote an article titled, “Great leap rightward? Nah, just finding balance”, he almost certainly is a Republican, just the fake-centrist kind that are going extinct, ’cause as had happened after the Great Depression in e’ery country, the US, now nearly 15 years into its recent depression, is dividing into the same social-democracy-vs.-fascist lines, with moderate conservatives & liberals crumbling ’tween them. Republicans aren’t going to vote for a Democrat ’cause they told them a Republican candidate is great; they’ll vote for that candidate ’stead. Trump didn’t win by swaying Democrats by praising Clinton; he won by swaying Republicans — you know, their target audience — by convincing them he’s a real Republican by hating Democrats. Maybe Democrats should cater to all those young Democrats they bitch ’bout ne’er voting for them rather than the 17% o’ Republicans who approve o’ Pence ( vs. the 51% o’ Republicans who still stick by Trump ). What pisses me off the most is that as imbecilic as this “advice” is — which, ’gain, I think is disingenuous with the goal o’ sabotaging Democrats — Democrats are just stupid ’nough to take it.

Sorry it’s not politically correct to acknowledge, but Republicans are terrible & will ne’er be convinced into not being terrible by having their terribleness catered to. Mike Pence is still a Dominionist ( read: Christian fascist ); he specifically asked the supreme court he had no problem being packed in the slimiest way possible to o’erturn Roe vs. Wade; he supported sanctions on Iran for bullshit reasons that is starving Iranians. Keeping the US’s shitty ’scuse for a republic up so it can continue to commit war crimes round the world isn’t e’en worth the lives o’ a couple dozen Iranian people. Fuck Pence — & fuck the USA.

I almost want to rank this lower than Frum’s article, since its central argument is much stupider. Frum’s inane feel-good bullshit was a’least harmless, if an opiate for the masses; this article’s message is actively stupid &, whether its dumbass writer acknowledges it or not, unquestionably acts toward moving the Overton Window & normalizing right-wing insurrection by treating those who don’t engage it as centrists, maybe e’en liberals, who deserve praise. Howe’er, structurally, it is better written than Frum’s 2nd-grade-crayon-scrawlings.

Tier: E

“Vaccines for the Littlest Kids Have Already Flopped” is the least interesting, which is to say it’s the least shitty, since we know The Atlantic is incapable o’ making compelling & intelligent articles, so what we end up here is a bunch o’ “news” that anyone not living under a giant Alf pog knows: the US government fucked up, as they always do ’cause the Republicans have strongly normalized an incapable government, which has e’en spread to Democrats, who aren’t exactly obsessed with a functional government themselves, mixed with Americans being uneducated dumbshits produced a strong stew o’ rising COVID cases. Most o’ this article is just stating facts with a few generic anecdotes that are, thankfully, not as “spiced” up as that San Francisco article novella I had to suffer thru, so it wasn’t too offensive to read.

The only part I have to comment on are the final 2 paragraphs, where The Atlantic’s lowest-common-denominator-sense creeps in:

There will be no simple solutions here. Financial incentives could help. School mandates, too, are an effective way to get immunization rates up, though in recent months, several states have introduced legislation to ban such measures. But the biggest and most difficult change will be cultural: repairing parents’ relationships to immunizations, and making COVID shots a little-kid routine. Every person I spoke with for this story stressed the importance of community outreach, and one-on-one conversations, starting with pediatricians, many families’ most reliable touchstone for care.

So we spend the length o’ a cough mentioning that some vague financial or legislative rules could “help” & offshore the work o’ going into detail to actually informative, scientific journals, & then sputter on ’bout “cultural” solutions, based on the advice o’ the same mass o’ idiots whose idiocy is a major cause o’ the problem. Yes, I’m sure a doctor telling their Fox-News-poisoned-brained patient that vaccines won’t put Microsoft 10 into their bloodstream will work. Till this article came out, doctors ne’er e’en considered the possibility o’ advising their patients to take vaccines. ¡Give this writer a nobel prize for their astounding advice!

It can work. Puerto Rico, which has one of the highest immunization rates in the entire country, also leads the U.S. in uptake of kids’ COVID shots—a trend that experts such as Mariola Rivera Reyes, a pediatric pulmonologist, attributes to the territory’s strong sense of community and trust in local leaders. “Almost all the parents I’ve talked to have been very enthusiastic,” said Rivera Reyes, who has taken to social media to connect with parents. “We haven’t encountered the resistance we can see in the mainland.”

“It can work” — then goes on to describe how it worked in a country with a “strong sense of community”, & therefore nothing like the US & an unworkable example. Please tell me how this virulently capitalist newspaper is going to help make the US mo’ community-oriented when they’ve been helping the forces that have been working toward the opposite for as long as they’ve existed.

Tier: B

The last article is just an advertisement for Jack White’s obsession with vinyl, which I give ’bout as many fucks for as the # o’ good articles The Atlantic has written. To be fair, given the choice ’tween Jack White & the Church o’ Scientology, I’d pick the former any day.

Tier 🤷

That’s all we have for now. Making you sit thru anymore o’ The Atlantic would be torture enhanced interrogation techniques. As an extra score count, I should note that this “liberal” newspaper has given us a 3/1 on Republicans vs. Democrats ( I assume anyone who believes that the vaccine is effective & won’t sell all your organs to China is a Democrat ). ’Mong those 3 Republicans were the US version o’ Goebbels; the ultimate example o’ a Karen whose only political stances are hating homeless people & drug users & wanting children to die o’ COVID; & a fervent fan o’ Mike Pence & who also has some weird obsession with falling birthrates, like all conservatives scared by the modern world do. Considering The Atlantic’s idea o’ “liberalism” is deliberately stoking cold wars & being imperialists — which is, I remind you, in fact, a key component o’ fascism — it’s no surprise.

All right, here’s your tier list:

The New York Times is a perennial target o’ mockery for the same reason as mainstream economics: as per my Nobel-Prize-winning Satirical Function for Determining Mockery for Particular Participants, a key component o’ Mezunian economics, as set forth in the face-melting Economicon, people with high opinions o’ their intelligence but low actual intelligence are the choicest targets. This is the newspaper who turn their noses @ the vulgar social media & blogs kicking their asses, which would be fine if they actually had standards ( I, too, turn my nose up @ social media, tho that’s mostly ’cause they have shitty user interfaces & try to dox me just by using them ), but this is also the same newspaper that regularly posts articles by “Suck On This, Iraq” living moustache Thomas Friedman; near Darwin Award winner for apparently almost dying from a pot candy bar, Maureen Dowd; Ross Douthat, a man who bragged ’bout how he was too stupid to read a relatively simple economics book that he shockingly misinterpreted ( Capital in the 21st Century isn’t Marxian but merely an adjustment to neoclassical economics ) while recommending creepy ol’ men in universities act as surrogate daddies to women students so they’d be less likely to be financially successful ( he references a study that shows that college students who attend rich parties a lot tend to be mo’ successful due to the networking opportunities ); & “Hot Dog & Bun Factory fairy tale proves offshoring doesn’t cause unemployment” Paul Krugman, the Nickelback o’ economists, dearly beloved by moderate “liberals” who have ne’er read any other economists.

So ’twas no surprise when looking o’er The New York Times’s list for the best books in the last 125 years ( that seemingly random # is due to it being a celebration for their own book reviews section ) that they also have terrible tastes in terms o’ literature. During the initial preliminaries we had a bizarre hodgepodge: Ulysses right next to “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” ( not only does The New York Times stupidly insist on using the inane US title made up by ignorant executives ’cause they thought US readers would be as dumb as them, they also picked 1 that hardly any Harry Potter fan would pick o’er, say, The Goblet of Fire or The Order of the Phoenix ), The Great Gatsby next to Charlotte’s Web. ( If they were going to include a kid’s book, ¿why the hell would they pick a book that mo’ people probably know ’bout due to the Hanna-Barbera cartoon rather than something like Alice in Wonderland, which has actual literary value & is 1000-times mo’ influential? ). Meanwhile missing are À la recherche du temps perdu, which is regularly put up there with Ulysses; no The Magic Mountain; no Gravity’s Rainbow; no Moby Dick; no Petersburg by Andrei Bely ( admittedly an underrated gem e’en outside the New York Times ); nor a single book by Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, William Falkner, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Umberto Eco, Borges, Yukio Mishima…

But since then they’ve narrowed it to 5 choices. Let’s see what these choices are:

5. Beloved

This isn’t a bad choice, tho NYT readers probably only know ’bout it now thanks to the brilliant marketing assistance Republicans are giving Toni Morrison by banning it from schools for making white kids feel queasy, a common character-building exercise schools employ ( Republicans, as everyone knows, are disgusted by the idea that their children might build mo’ character ’bove their own feebleness ).

I want you to keep in mind this entry’s ranking for later, tho…

4. One Hundred Years of Solitude

Also a solid book, tho I can’t imagine anyone truly familiar with Latin American literature ranking this as higher than much o’ Borges’s work ( indeed, it’s a post on r/unpopularopinions ), which was much mo’ experimental & arguably mo’ influential. Granted, this is probably the only Latin American work these honkeys know.

3. 1984

& here’s where it all goes downhill. This book is dogshit. Isaac Asimov wrote a famous devastating review gainst this book & its cynical attempt to half-assedly exploit science fiction without understanding an iota o’ that genre & all its nuances as a tool for pure political propaganda by a man who, howe’er great his politics were ( a’least before he started McCarthying people he suspected were communist, gay, “too anti-white” — read: opposed to racism gainst black people — to the UK’s IRD ), ne’er had any respect or understanding for art as art itself, who saw it as nothing beyond a tool for propaganda, as everything else. Beyond politics this book has no value: its characters are 1-dimensional strawmen, its language is basic, & the world-building is shallow & inane — a whiny teenager’s idea o’ how e’en totalitarian societies operate, which is why teenagers ( & those whose politics is mentally adolescent ) love it so much.

But e’en as propaganda, this book is an utter failure: it’s an amazing self-own that such a vociferous democratic socialist created the greatest tool o’ propaganda gainst socialism, used primarily by alt-right hacks like Ben Shapiro, which is easy thanks to this book being so broad & vague — which is precisely why it “resonates” with everyone: it allows everyone to fill in the “evil” side with whate’er they want. That the man who warned ’bout the emptiness o’ terms like “democracy” & “fascism” would write a book with heroes & villains so empty is a shocking failure. His nonfiction, specially his essays & Homage to Catalonia, are far better than this waste o’ time.

2. “The Fellowship of the Ring”

The New York Times are such morons that they don’t e’en realize that this isn’t a book, but part o’ a book: mistaking The Lord of the Rings as a “trilogy” ’stead o’ a single, unified book separated into volumes by the publisher gainst Tolkein’s wishes for crass business reasons is a classic amateur move. For anyone else it’d be nitpicking, but it’s hilarious to me that an organization that prides themselves on s’posed honest integrity would make a basic mistake that you’d get roasted for on fucking TV Tropes, the website that lets anyone add whate’er conspiracy theory they want without citations & calls themselves a “buttload mo’ informal” than Wikipedia ( which also wouldn’t let such a sloppy mistake slide ). This is pretty much exhibit A evidence that it’d be safer to get your news from Wikipedia than The New York Times ( which is not to encourage getting one’s news from Wikipedia ).

They also lose points for not using the kickass psychedelic book covers they used in the 60s official US editions as their image:

Some might expect me to laugh @ The New York Times for putting a mainstream fantasy work @ the #2 spot; but while I myself would not consider The Lord of the Rings the 2nd best novel o’ the last 125 years, or e’en in the top 10, I can see some reasoning ’hind its inclusion: it’s unquestionably the most influential book on this list that pretty much created the modern fantasy genre as it exists. That deserves some props. It also has a lot mo’ literary value than people give it credit: it has finely-crafted worldbuilding that pays attention to details down to the moon cycles with believable fantasy languages ( helped by Tolkein being a legit linguist ). While the characters can be hokey sometimes, there is mo’ moral nuance than one might remember: it’s a clever twist that the ring is vanquished not by the nobility o’ the heroes, who it turns out, are not so heroic that they can o’ercome the ring’s power, but by the pitiful Golem, who accidentally drops it in the volcano trying to steal it — & is only able to ’cause earlier in the book the heroes decide to spare him. Granted, it’s just conservative Christian “turn the other cheek” slave morality; but genuine Christian morality is mo’ refreshing than the might-makes-right white-&-black morality that conservatives oft erroneously pass off as Christian morality. Moreo’er, tho, this book has excellent prose, specially its scenery descriptions, which is a rarity in a lot o’ contemporary literature, both “literary” & “genre”.

It’s better than Harry Potter & certainly several leagues ’bove 1984, as well as the next book on this list…

1. To Kill a Mockingbird

This choice for #1 book o’ the past 125 years is such an amazingly bad choice — & yet so perfect for The New York Times’s main demographic. Its o’errated mediocrity is merely a reflection o’ The New York Times.

Much as 1984 is only beloved as juvenile political propaganda, To Kill a Mockingbird is mainly beloved as a weak white-centric attack gainst racism — which is specially bad when you consider Beloved, a much better book in every way that’s much mo’ devastating & unsentimental in its criticism o’ racism, was 4 books below. That none o’ Ralph Ellison’s books made it on this list or e’en the preliminary list is criminal. These fuckers thought god damn Charlotte’s Web is better than Invisible Man. What toilet paper o’ a newspaper.

& yet, it can’t be a surprise that the multitude o’ self-indulgent white liberals who read The New York Times would prefer this self-masturbatory tract o’ the noble middle-class white lawyer who tries to save a black man, who is treated mo’ as a prop to demonstrate our white savior’s greatness than as a real person, from the savage poor whites. Mixed in this book is a ton o’ classism: only the upper-middle-class lazy-libertarian Atticus, who opposes systems o’ racial inequality but praises systems o’ economic inequality that are just as racist, & Tom Robinson’s rich employer are depicted as anti-racism ( the book doesn’t acknowledge that both these people — the Atticuses have a black servant — exploit their racist society to get cheap labor out o’ black people ). It legit reads like a South Park episode, & is a twisted view o’ the real world: tho there are definitely racist, dumb, & repulsive poor white people, rich white institutions are the leaders in exploiting racism for their gains.

In addition to its weak-ass politics, this book doesn’t have all that much literary value. Compare Beloved, with its anachronistic chapter order & its greater use o’ imagery, color, symbolism, & just o’erall much better prose. To Kill a Mockingbird is a thoroughly unexperimental book with prose so basic & repetitive it becomes tedious to read real quick & makes hardly any use o’ the large gamut o’ tools the English language & structures put @ the writer’s disposal. Ironically, Truman Capote’s friend hardly did a better job o’ writing rather than typing than Jack Kerouac.

Here’s an example o’ the stellar prose in this book:

The Radley Place fascinated Dill. In spite of our warnings and explanations it drew him as the moon draws water, but drew him no nearer than the light-pole on the corner, a safe distance from the Radley gate. There he would stand, his arm around the fat pole, staring and wondering.

The Radley Place jutted into a sharp curve beyond our house. Walking south, one faced its porch; the sidewalk turned and ran beside the lot. The house was low, was once white with a deep front porch and green shutters, but had long agodarkened to the color of the slate-gray yard around it. Rain-rotted shingles drooped over the eaves of the veranda; oak trees kept the sun away. The remains of a picket drunkenly guarded the front yard— a “swept” yard that was never swept— where johnson grass and rabbit-tobacco grew in abundance.

& that was me trying to find a relatively good part o’ the book. It’s hardly the worst prose in the world — ¿but this is the kind o’ prose in the best book o’ the past 125 years? ¿Better than the flowing detailed descriptions o’ À la recherche du temps perdu? ¿Better than the haiku-like sharp details & experimental subjective perspectives o’ Virginia Woolf’s The Waves? Give me an hour & I could probably find 100 books with better prose than this book, which hardly has any better prose than your average Stephen King or James Patterson. I think Brandon Sanderson probably has better prose & unquestionably Lord of the Rings does.

Meanwhile, most o’ the prose is tedious dreck like this:

Mrs. Merriweather seemed to have a hit, everybody was cheering so, but she caught me backstage and told me I had ruined her pageant. She made me feel awful, but when Jem came to fetch me he was sympathetic. He said he couldn’t see my costume much from where he was sitting. How he could tell I was feeling bad under my costume I don’t know, but he said I did all right, I just came in a little late, that was all. Jem was becoming almost as good as Atticus at making you feel right when things went wrong. Almost—not even Jem could make me go through that crowd, and he consented to wait backstage with me until the audience left.

I know some people take the “show, don’t tell” thing too far & demand that everyone “clench their fist” & bark like dogs rather than just be pissed off, but “She made me feel awful, but when Jem came to fetch me he was sympathetic” might be 1 o’ the most sterile way to describe something, specially since the sentence right after already shows how he shows sympathy, so this sentence is redundant filler. I refuse to believe this isn’t rough draft material.

& I know this is s’posed to be a child narrating ( ¿tho is it s’posed to be a child now or an adult reminiscing ’bout their childhood? ), but e’en children aren’t this dull, & it’s not as if children are this grammatically correct, anyway. Contrast with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is also from the perspective o’ a child, which has much mo’ character to its hick talk — not the least o’ which ’cause Mark Twain put much mo’ care into the various dialects. Also, Huckleberry Finn is a comedy, so its plain talk works better than when To Kill a Mockingbird tries to use it for s’posedly profound speeches.

Here’s an example o’ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’s much better prose:

We judged that three nights more would fetch us to Cairo, at the bottom of Illinois, where the Ohio River comes in, and that was what we was after. We would sell the raft and get on a steamboat and go way up the Ohio amongst the free States, and then be out of trouble.

Well, the second night a fog begun to come on, and we made for a towhead to tie to, for it wouldn’t do to try to run in a fog; but when I paddled ahead in the canoe, with the line to make fast, there warn’t anything but little saplings to tie to. I passed the line around one of them right on the edge of the cut bank, but there was a stiff current, and the raft come booming down so lively she tore it out by the roots and away she went. I see the fog closing down, and it made me so sick and scared I couldn’t budge for most a half a minute it seemed to me—and then there warn’t no raft in sight; you couldn’t see twenty yards. I jumped into the canoe and run back to the stern, and grabbed the paddle and set her back a stroke. But she didn’t come. I was in such a hurry I hadn’t untied her. I got up and tried to untie her, but I was so excited my hands shook so I couldn’t hardly do anything with them.

As soon as I got started I took out after the raft, hot and heavy, right down the towhead. That was all right as far as it went, but the towhead warn’t sixty yards long, and the minute I flew by the foot of it I shot out into the solid white fog, and hadn’t no more idea which way I was going than a dead man.

Note that when this book’s telling, it just tells in short sentences, saving its long, multi-clause sentences for mo’ detailed description. Also note how the hick talk is done thru a much livelier dialect, rather than just sounding like it’s coming from an uneducated robot.

Keep in mind, most wouldn’t say that Huckleberry Finn has anywhere near the best prose o’ all literature — it’s just 1 o’ hundreds with better prose than To Kill a Mockingbird.

While this book is relatively short @ 96,000 words, its main plots — Tom Robinson’s trial & the mystery o’ Boo Radley — are e’en shorter. So short, in fact, that this book could probably be a novella if not for all the padded-out dialogue of ordinary people doing ordinary things. There’s 1 scene that goes on for several pages wherein Jem tries to give a note to Boo Radley, which just goes back & forth with filler dialogue, only to end on a shaggy dog story when Atticus stops him. This kind o’ stuff isn’t inherently terrible: Ulysses, widely considered 1 o’ the best works o’ English literature, is mostly just ordina — well, people doing ordinary things. But that book plays a dozen literary tricks as it does so, which is why there are entire books dedicated to footnotes for every few sentence o’ that book, while there’s nothing to say ’bout e’ery “Thank you” & “No, sir” in this book. Plus, e’en its prose is better: nothing in this book will compare to the lavish way Bloom describes the uses o’ water in the “Ithaca” chapter.

’Nother contrast. Here’s 1 o’ the dozen or so pointless scenes in Mockingbird:

One afternoon a month later Jem was ploughing his way through Sir Walter Scout, as Jem called him, and Mrs. Dubose was correcting him at every turn, when there was a knock on the door. “Come in!” she screamed.

Atticus came in. He went to the bed and took Mrs. Dubose’s hand. “I was coming from the office and didn’t see the children,” he said. “I thought they might still be here.”

Mrs. Dubose smiled at him. For the life of me I could not figure out how she could bring herself to speak to him when she seemed to hate him so. “Do you know what time it is, Atticus?” she said. “Exactly fourteen minutes past five. The alarm clock’s set for five-thirty. I want you to know that.”

It suddenly came to me that each day we had been staying a little longer at Mrs. Dubose’s, that the alarm clock went off a few minutes later every day, and that she was well into one of her fits by the time it sounded. Today she had antagonized Jem for nearly two hours with no intention of having a fit, and I felt hopelessly trapped. The alarm clock was the signal for our release; if one day it did not ring, what would we do?

“I have a feeling that Jem’s reading days are numbered,” said Atticus.

“Only a week longer, I think,” she said, “just to make sure…”

Jem rose. “But—”

Atticus put out his hand and Jem was silent. On the way home, Jem said he had to do it just for a month and the month was up and it wasn’t fair.

“Just one more week, son,” said Atticus.

“No,” said Jem. “Yes,” said Atticus.

( “‘Come in!’ she screamed”, followed immediately in the next paragraph, “Atticus came in”, is some prime bathos ).

Anyway, here’s the far better “boring” scene from Ulysses:

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 % of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

( This is also bathos, but intentional, & much mo’ interesting & obviously took much mo’ work to conjure up than the filler dialogue before ).

OK… but all these problems would be… acceptable, I guess, for the best book e’er if the plot & characters were jaw-droppingly well-written. Well, they’re not. The story is average @ best, but the characters are straight-up terribly written. This book stars not 1, but 2 Mary Sues: the aforementioned noble white middle-class lawyer, who has no flaws, & his spoiled brat o’ a narrator who’s not like all the other girls & spends most o’ the book praising her flawless father. I should add that this book is heavily based on Harper Lee’s own upbringing, so it’s a shock that the characters who represent the author & her beloved father are depicted as perfect. This legit reads like a bad fan fiction or webcomic.

There are 3 types o’ characters in this book: the perfect anti-racist white heroes, the vile racist poor white villains ( so vile that the main villain has to stoop to attacking the Finch children, e’en tho racist people rarely go round killing the white children o’ e’en antiracist white people, ’cause apparently killing black people isn’t evil ’nough ), & the black people, who are all peaceful, servile Uncle Tom 2ndary props to warm all the white liberal hearts. 1 sickeningly sappy scene depicts a large community o’ blacks giving food to their white Jesus, Atticus. The 1 time a black person does anything resembling active resistance is when Tom Robinson tries to flee from jail & is shot to death, which is considered foolish by our noble whites & worth mo’ noble pitying. In this book black people are worthy o’ nothing beyond pity. That’s why they’re symbolized by the titular mockingbird that’s killed: they’re cute li’l pets to make rich white liberals feel good ’bout themselves ( to be fair, the other “mockingbird” is a shy abused child, who is also a pet for well-off people, & his abuse is ’nother example o’ the evil o’ poor people ). Heaven forbid this book depict actual struggle — ¡perhaps e’en with violence! — as that would make this book’s white audience squeamish & they would probably turn round & root for their white supremacist society. This book’s outdated relic o’ racial ( & specially economic ) politics is perfect for an outdated relic that is The New York Times, whose own politics are consistently early-20th-century.

Special note should be given to their critic note for this book. In addition to acknowledging their idiocy in missing a basic fact stated plainly ( since subtlety was beyond Harper Lee’s literary skills ) in this book when they 1st read it, they @ 1 point brag ’bout how New York is so much better than the savage rural lands ’cause they know how to leave people ’lone ( said the airbag who probably supported “Stop & Frisk” for “improving law & order” ), leaving e’en an urbanite elitist like me wishing to Allah that Al-Qaeda would bomb these fuckers ’gain.