This week in disenfranchisement: college students

By Dan Brooks in Inequality 3 Comments

Dirty hippies moan around their crap bus.

If you live in a college town like I do, you’ve probably noticed that the streets go unpaved and everyone pays exorbitant taxes so the state can give free abortions to black girls. That’s because all the students overbalance the electorate, forcing real, over-25 human beings to cow to their agenda of ignorance and, I dunno, socialism. College students don’t know anything about politics. They may live in one town for four to six years, but they don’t actually live there, because they’re too busy swallowing live goldfish and listening to raps. They’re not real people, which is why they should only be allowed to vote wherever they came from—presumably where their parents live. That’s the reasoning behind House Bill 176 in New Hampshire, which would bar college students from voting in the cities where they attend school, and Republican opposition to HB 130 in Montana, which would have expanded voting by mail.

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Having two moms makes you an awesome public speaker

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 6 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSQQK2Vuf9Q

That slick sumbitch is Zach Wahls, a 19 year-old University of Iowa student who spoke before the Iowa House of Representatives yesterday to oppose the Iowa Marriage Amendment, which would define marriage as between a man and a woman. Wahls was raised by a committed lesbian couple—which technically makes him a slick sumbitches—and, as you can see, he constitutes a strong counterargument to the claim that a child raised by same-sex parents could not possibly turn out normal.* The IMA passed the house, but this video is likely to change a few minds, or at least cement minds already inclined in that direction. I remain pretty thrilled by it, but my friend Fletch Dogg—who, when he is not playing devil’s advocate, is a regular advocate—raised an interesting question: How is this video different from Tim Tebow’s pro-life Super Bowl ad, which makes me angry?

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The big one has a weak heart and is feminine

By Dan Brooks in Fascism 2 Comments

Kim Jong Il poses a problem. On one hand, he is an aggressive dictator, incrementally starving his people so he can continue to destabilize the rest of south Asia. On the other hand, he is hilarious. Look at him up there with his terrifyingly normal family in 1981, teasing the camera with some sort of Warren Beatty facial expression. The only person in the picture possibly more awesome is the child sitting next to him, who, as soon as the shutter clicks, will lunge forward and strike the photographer in the groin. He is Kim Jong Chol, and thirty years after this picture was taken, he will not get to run North Korea. Thirty years after this picture was taken, his father’s escaped personal chef will tell Chosun Ilbo that Jong Il can often be heard to say, “The big one has a weak heart and is feminine, but the young one is manly.” Props to everyone’s favorite Meghan Gallagher for the link.

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Canaries: Rep. Jack Kingston derides evolution on Maher

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 11 Comments

God blows on Rep. Jack Kingston (R–GA)

Before we get into this, I should say that I do not like Bill Maher. He is an outspoken atheist and a vaguely mean-spirited liberal, which means he inspires in me that vague discomfort that comes from watching a person you do not like say what you would say. Those of us who believe that sarcasm is not a form of argument do not enjoy watching Maher snicker his way through our deeply-held positions, which made his discussion of evolution with Representative Jack Kingston (R–GA, net worth $2.8 million, 2009 reported income $507 somehow) a real opportunity to see both sides of a coin of suck. Video after the jump.

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Friday links: Here is your American culture edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 3 Comments

Google Image Search result: "American culture."

I don’t know if my brain performs some sort of maintenance task* on Thursday nights or what, but every once in a while, I wake up on Friday morning and find American culture extremely weird and alienating. Today is one such Friday. How did we arrive at our peculiar combination of performative Christian morality and relentless sexualization of women, men, children and sometimes objects? Even if you can explain that, how did we get from there to Tracy Morgan? The invention of endstopped rhyming language patterns seems vertiginously contingent enough, without even mentioning murder-themed clown rap. Virtually every particular of society and discourse is arbitrary and bizarre when you look at it closely, yet our immersion in it makes it all seem so necessary. It’s the existential dilemma writ large: radical contingency, radical interrelationship, radical nutjobs yelling at you on television. Today is Friday, nothing makes any goddamn sense at all, and it’s all super important. Here is your American culture.

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