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.

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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?

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Closure of SpamIt.com reduces global spam volume by 20%

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 4 Comments

Igor Gusev and his cat, EnlargePenisNow! (Not pictured: Gusev)

The global quantity of spam email has dropped by one fifth since Russian authorities launched an investigation of SpamIt.com, a Russian site that paid spammers to advertise online pharmacies. SpamIt was allegedly run by Igor Gusev, a 31 year-old Muscovite best known for repeatedly explaining the phrase “I run a website that pays the owners of automated email generators to promote online pharmacies” at cocktail parties. It turns out that’s all one word in Russian, and it sounds a lot like the word for “I am a total cock-gobbler.”

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Reality versus what we claim to want

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 5 Comments

The Situation and Professor Plumpers from MTV's Jersey Shore, the highest-rated television show among viewers aged 18-49. Those are possibly not their real names.

Depending on how many Facebook photos exist of you holding up a sideways peace sign,* you probably bring a varyingly complex level of irony to Jersey Shore. The MTV reality show is currently the top-rated television program among Americans 18-49, which makes it perhaps the most valuable commodity on television. Americans aged 18 to 49 buy stuff, as Situation and Professor’s decision to wear necklaces and bracelets to the beach indicates. According to the New York Times, 15 of the 20 top-rated shows for that age group this summer were unscripted—America’s Got Talent, Big Brother, The Bachelorette, So You Think you Can Dance, et cetera. That’s interesting, since in a TiVo poll reported in the same article, reality television was also the genre that the most respondents called “overdone.”

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God forsakes state of Louisiana again

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 2 Comments

Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, presumably saying "Come on, now."

I don’t know if you heard this, but BP poured like 80 millions gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. If you’re coming to this news for the first time, I’m sorry to alarm you, but so far nobody really knows how to stop that. The Deepwater Horizons well has been gushing pretty much uncontrollably for the last sixty-some days, despite a series of comically simple-sounding and horrifically complicated-actually-doing attempts by BP to plug the damn hole. At this point, our options seem to be to A) continue trying, even though everything we’ve tried has failed or B) give up. It should be noted that Option A has thus far yielded the same results one might reasonably expect from Option B. Maybe—just maybe, it’s starting to kind of look like, although of course none of us wants to think this way—all the oil that is under the Gulf of Mexico is just going to flow into the Gulf of Mexico, killing if not everything then most things. The key, under such circumstances, is to not lose hope—to keep trying no matter how difficult the trial, since to do otherwise is to guarantee the failure whose prospect so daunts us in the first place. Enter the Louisiana state legislature.

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