From Calamities of Nature comes this comic (the image here is just the first panel). I don’t want to spoil it for you, but I’ve heard a similar argument made by Sam Harris concerning the word “elite” in a Newsweek essay about Sarah Palin and politics last year. Not exactly the same argument, but [...]

Sarah Palin is the darling of the Republican party, but her cries against the “Washington elite” are contradictory with her own desire to become one… as Christopher Hitchens points out.

In an editorial by Sam Harris, this passage really struck me. Ask yourself: how has “elitism” become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, [...]