Bros: Are they hipsters?

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 1 Comment
The beard says hipster. The Bernie says bro. What kind of other person is this?

The beard says hipster. The Bernie says bro. What kind of other person is this?

Perhaps the greatest achievement in the last decade of social journalism has been the elimination of hipsters. At one time, hipsters were such a powerful force that they threatened to displace all other groups. By 2009, for example, they were so numerous that Time magazine found it more efficient to describe them in terms of who they were not:

Hipsters are the friends who sneer when you cop to liking Coldplay. They’re the people who wear T-shirts silk-screened with quotes from movies you’ve never heard of and the only ones in America who still think Pabst Blue Ribbon is a good beer. They sport cowboy hats and berets and think Kanye West stole their sunglasses. Everything about them is exactingly constructed to give off the vibe that they just don’t care.

Here the author lays out the hipsters’ defining characteristics: they don’t like the band you like, but they like the movie and beer you don’t. They wear hats. And they pretend they don’t care, when in fact we all care very deeply. We care so much about who is a hipster that we successfully hounded them out of existence. But they left a demographic vacuum that has been filled by bros.

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Tom Hitchner on refuting the argument no one is making

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 30 Comments
Yankees pitcher CC Sabathia

Yankees pitcher CC Sabathia

Yesterday, New York Yankees pitcher CC Sabathia announced that he was going to rehab for his addiction to alcohol and would miss the playoffs. Pretty much everyone applauded his choice. You’d have to be a real jerk, even by the standards of Yankees fans, to say that Sabathia should put off addressing his problem so he could pitch the postseason.

But wouldn’t it be great if someone did? I could refute the hell out of that argument. Virtually every person of sense would agree with me, and I could take the moral high ground while savoring that feeling of eviscerating someone else. And if no one of consequence actually says Sabathia should keep playing, I could still put a beating on that straw man:

Screen Shot 2015-10-06 at 9.26.34 AM

Tom Hitchner has written a fine essay about this phenomenon and why it surely does no one any good. Central to his consideration is a peculiarity of the internet age: If you can’t find any professionals who are advancing a stupid argument, someone on Twitter is.

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This man who believes money is speech also has Tourette’s

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 0 Comment
A Maine lobster and a possibly different Dan Backer

A Maine lobster and possibly different Dan Backer

Dan Backer is an activist for campaign finance reform who won McCutcheon v. FEC, the Supreme Court case that lifted aggregate limits on individual contributions to political campaigns. “Money in politics is great,” he told Marin Cogan of New York Magazine. “Restraints on political communication are fundamentally about protecting the status quo, and also about preventing people from having every bit of information they want to consume.”

Backer also has Tourette’s Syndrome. Showing remarkable restraint, Cogan puts this information in paragraph ten:

[Backer has] also helped organize the Stop Pelosi PAC and Stop R.E.I.D. PAC, and helps run the Conservative Action Fund, a tea-party group funded by Shaun McCutcheon. He is rarely the public face of these groups; Backer has Tourette’s syndrome, which causes facial tics and other TV-unfriendly gestures, like the tendency to gesture at you with both middle fingers as he’s speaking.

That’s a rich image. We often think of the claim that money can be speech as inherently disingenuous: you’d only believe that if someone paid you. The image of Backer delivering the Stockton heybuddy along with his argument must have been enormously tempting as a lead. Kudos to Cogan for not doing that, and for presenting Backer as someone who genuinely believes in his cause. I sure do disagree with him, though.

Slate on the “first-person industrial complex”

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 0 Comment
The top of a Jezebel story whose original headline was "I bed Dad."

The top of a Jezebel story whose original headline was presumably “I bed Dad.”

Laura Bennett has written an interesting piece on the microgenre of harrowing first-person essays, which has become a distinctive and popular type of internet writing over the last few years. Bennett knows of what she speaks: as a senior editor at Slate, she reads and often helps produce such work. But she also worries that the confessional essay appeals to inexperienced or emerging writers who maybe don’t appreciate the ramifications of publishing a clickbait essay about, for example, fucking their dads.

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Knowing what we know now, I should have smoke-bombed Megyn Kelly and disappeared

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 0 Comment
Jeb Bush

Today’s Combat! blog is written by guest contributor Jeb Bush.

As a person who might consider someday becoming a candidate for president, I knew the media would try to trip me up with “gotcha” questions. But I also knew that the American people—and, to a lesser extent, immigrants—deserve to learn about their potential candidates’ views. And we all know they can’t get enough Bush. My dad was president, and my brother was president twice. Who knows but I might be elected president three or four times? I mean if I decide to run. Anywho, the other thing my dad and brother both did was start wars with Iraq, which was great. Still, knowing what we know now, when Megyn Kelly asked me if I would have invaded Iraq, I should have dropped a smoke bomb, ninja-twisted her neck and disappeared.

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