I’m a big fan of Atrios and his blog, Eschaton. Here’s a worthwhile thought on which to end a year that ought to have been instructive:

There’s a kind of righteous certainty among people who succeeded because they knew how to check all the right boxes when they were 15, a belief that if they (and you) do check all the the right boxes then everything will go as planned. High fives! (Snuffy Walden score!) [link added]

Not a lot of self-doubt, not a lot of self-recrimination. Among other things, it’s a worldview which is very unsympathetic to the failure of others, failures that could not have resulted from anything other than a failure to check the boxes.

This is from a post called “Good Boys and Good Girls.”