Louis CK and the universal problem of particularity

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 8 Comments

“I fly first class,” Louis CK notes near the beginning of Live At the Beacon Theater. “It’s only for another year at the most. Believe me, it’s not gonna last.” It’s funny because it’s true and, as an associate used to say, it’s true because it’s sad. You could argue—by you I again mean me—that here is Louis CK’s métier: things that are funny because they go unacknowledged, paradoxically because they are depressing. It is a project of recovering funny from the dumb and brutal world, the way the early naturalists used to talk about beauty. I submit that this process of reclamation offers a decent working definition of art.

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Airline boarding times have doubled since 1970

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 4 Comments

Like a lot of basically happy people, I believe the general public is getting stupider over time. It’s not a novel idea. In the Odes, Horace complains that “our fathers, viler than our grandfathers, begot us who are even viler, and we bring forth a progeny more degenerate still.” That was in like 12 BC, and we can only imagine how he would have felt had he lived to see everyone adopt Christianity a couple generations later. The future always looks weird and scary. Since the present is basically a broke-ass version of the future, it follows that it should appear gross and dumb. Or maybe—and I’m just spitballing here—the people alive now really are exceptionally lazy and stupid. The very notion of human progress implies the possibility of regress, so some iterations of society must be more inept than others, right? If only there were some way to measure it. Incidentally, airline boarding times have doubled since 1970.

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Joel Marks on post-moralism

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 2 Comments

You must never touch him.

If you enjoy nuanced philosophical discussions occasionally interrupted by a smugly facile Stanley Fish, you probably already read the New York Times’s Stone blog. I’ve lost you already, haven’t I? How about this: on Sunday, the Times published an opinion piece that contained the sentence “the personal experiment of excluding all moral concepts and language from my thinking, feeling and actions has proved so workable and attractive, I am convinced that anyone who gives it a fair shot would likely find it to his liking.” That’s Joel Marks, writing about his transition from secular ethicist to amoralist and touching on several interesting problems in contemporary discourse. In addition to being the subject of the world’s shortest-range headshot, Marks proposes that faith in an objective morality is no more reasonable than faith in god. He also introduces a spate of unfounded assumptions along the way.

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The confidence game

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 1 Comment

I don’t know if you follow the markets, but it’s been one hell of a week. The Dow lost nearly five percent of its value yesterday, following another day of steep declines likely precipitated by S&P’s downgrading of the US federal credit rating last Friday. That move shook investor confidence—as did the decision of certain commentary blogs to cover mean campus organizations in Pakistan instead of the most significant financial event of the year—and confidence is what makes a modern market go. In an economy based on making things, growth is spurred by demand. In an investment economy, somewhat tautologically based on making money, growth is spurred by demand for investments. The more people think a stock market is going to do well, the better it does, and vice versa. Today—as of 12:38 Eastern, at least—a bunch of people decided that the Dow would probably go up, and it did. Which begs the question: why don’t we just have confidence in the market and watch it go up?

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Bikes win Flight vs. Bike challenge at Carmageddon

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 13 Comments

Cyclists at the Critical Mass bike ride in Vancouver

When I visit Los Angeles, I am chauffeured from hot tub to bar to party to beach in private automobiles and therefore learn nothing of the city’s freeway system. There’s a 110* and a 101, and until last weekend there was a 405. That last one is really important, apparently, since its closure for construction prompted LA city officials to declare “Carmageddon” and urge Angelenos to stay home all weekend. The predicted final reckoning of good vs. evil cars didn’t really happen, but it seemed like enough of a possibility that Jet Blue offered a special flight from Burbank to Long Beach airports. Solving a traffic jam by taking a jet airplane across town was so stunningly American that it, in turn, prompted the Flight vs. Bike Challenge, in which a team of cyclists tried to beat the Jet Blue plane from BUR to LGB—and won, easily.

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