Why isn’t Julian Assange a better person?

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 1 Comment

For those of us who remain committed, on an ideological if not a practical level, to the notion that the truth can never be immoral, Julian Assange is an increasingly troubling person. When Assange first released his cache of US diplomatic cables to various news outlets, Combat! blog took the position that Wikileaks is awesome. It got us into a lot of spirited discussions—viz. “Is That Journalism?” at Flippers and the extremely treacherous “Is That Rape?” at Mom’s kitchen table—that emphasized the enormous gap between theoretical and actual applications of the Truth. The Truth exists as a sort of disembodied ideal in our heads, but it goes out into the world in the company of people and events. As this excellent narrative of the people and events surrounding the Wikileaks disclosures suggests,* the Truth is frustratingly inseparable from the person telling it. The more we learn about Julian Assange’s truth-telling, the more his project seems to be about the telling rather than the truth. That’s a shame, since it seems to be what the powers that Assange set out to embarrass wanted in the first place.

Continue reading

What to do about those pesky poor

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 4 Comments

You can tell he's really poor, because a dog is gnawing on his foot.

Now that a new Congress has convened and pledged itself to beating back the deficit we accumulated out of nowhere in the last two years, we have to think about poor people. Personally, that’s something I try to limit to the ten or so minutes it takes me to get in and out of Taco Bell, but it so happens that A) poor people are where we’re going to trim the deficit, since wars, social security and tax cuts for the rich are utterly indispensable, and B) present conditions mean that there are a lot more of them. It turns out that a high school dropout and a 40 of Old English isn’t the only way to make new poor people. You can also do it with a massive economic contraction. As any recently unemployed person will tell you, those are the good kind of poor people: the ones who love work and being responsible, but who through no fault of their own have been temporarily deprived of their opportunity to do either. Such hard-working, down-on-their-luck Americans are the ones we are obliged to help. But how to do it without also giving professional poor people a free ride?

Continue reading

GOP announces series of figurative acts

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 2 Comments

House Majority Leader and real American Eric Cantor (R–VA) riles up the Cantormaniacs.

Republicans in the House of Representatives have officially scheduled a vote to repeal health care reform for January 12, according to a spokesman for Eric Cantor. Before you get excited, remember that said vote—which will almost certainly pass, given the Republicans’ 242-seat majority—stands not a charwoman’s chance of actually repealing anything. Senate Democrats have vowed to block any such bill in their chamber, and even when they eventually renege on that promise because they heard 17% of Americans would think they were reds if they didn’t, the President will surely exercise his veto. Basically, the repeal vote is a symbol. It’s also officially the GOP’s number-one priority for the 2012 congressional term, which is odd, considering that they presumably know the lay of the land as well as we do. It turns out, though, that the newly Republican-controlled House has laid out a whole agenda of purely theoretical governance.

Continue reading

“I have everything except a death certificate”

By Dan Brooks in Baby Boomers 0 Comment

Rioters protest debt-induced austerity measures in Greece.

It’s a new year, and that means we’re incrementally closer to a terrifying future only imaginable to our grandchildren, whose brains will have much more highly-evolved nightmare centers. Or not—it depends on how the economy shakes out. In Europe, where the economy has been shaking out into a fine dust since the Marshall Plan, things are not looking so good. A few weeks ago, we discussed student riots in Britain over proposed hikes in university tuition. Yesterday, the New York Times ran this story containing the quote in our headline, in which Italy’s Francesca Esposito—who totally knows where to get ecstasy, by the way, but does not want to meet you at your hostel—laments her position as a 29 year-old penta-ligual with master’s and law degrees who can’t find a paying job. Instead, she works as an unpaid “legal trainee” for the Italian government—in their social security administration, no less. Like a lot of young people in southern Europe, Esposito gets paid in irony, and she’s pissed.

Continue reading

Happy New Year from Combat! blog

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 0 Comment

It’s seven degrees below zero in Montana, and the world is as fresh as a newborn babe completely encased in ice. Happy New Year to you and yours from me and me. I’ll be setting out for the wooded mountains in a few hours, where I will have a great time and/or die. Provided one or neither of those things happens, we’ll be back on Monday with a bold new perspective that looks remarkably similar to our old one. We’ll have a bunch of gym-related rules for ourselves, though.