Kanye West explains problem of social networking, accidentally

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 5 Comments

Kanye West and Kim Kardashian on a zipline tour of Mexico with the dude who owns Girls Gone Wild.

Normally Combat! blog does not concern itself with celebrities, for the simple reason that we are much more interested in ourselves. It is a widespread problem. Anyone who has taught Intro to Creative Writing knows the power of the autobiographical story to fascinate exactly one person. What happens to us is wildly compelling; even if the plot isn’t great, the setting at the center of the universe makes it terrific. What happens to others is boring. It seems like a perfect system, but there’s a flaw. Kanye West found it a couple weeks ago, when he tweeted and quickly deleted the following:

Then Kim was like, “oh, someone mentioned me on Twitter.”

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On the ethics of keeping ethics to yourself

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 7 Comments

Nietzsche in a cowboy outfit for some wonderful reason

The people I know who do not believe in god tend to wind up with the same ethical systems as the people who do. Maybe it’s the beneficent influence of a traditionally religious society; maybe it’s biological, but people of all creeds enjoy consensus on basic altruism. You don’t need the Bible to tell you stealing is bad, for the same reason that you don’t need a referee to play backyard football. Ethical systems are based on actions, results and sometimes motives. Provided they agree on what’s right and what’s wrong, two ethical systems can be functionally congruent while totally disagreeing on why wrong is wrong and not right.

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Rolling Stone runs scariest global warming article ever

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 10 Comments

Make no mistake: they’d drive Denalis and eat your family if they could. Because your family is so fat.

I talked to a lot of farmers this week, and they disagreed about whether there would be no corn crop in Iowa this year or if there would simply be a catastrophically small one. The Midwest is wheezing through the worst drought in 50 years. Everybody’s lawn is dead. May was the 327th consecutive month in which the global temperature exceeded the 20th-century average; the odds of that happening by chance are 3.7 x 10^-99, which exceeds the number of stars in the known universe. That last number comes from Bill McKibben’s terrifying article on global warming in the most recent issue of Rolling Stone. If McKibben is to be believed, climate change is not a scientific controversy or even a problem that threatens to make life unrecognizable in 100 years. It is a thing that could put Africa underwater in 20 years, and nobody is doing dick about it.

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Jesus Christ, Doug Glanville

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 2 Comments

Former Cub/Philly and startlingly good writer Doug Glanville

For a man who has led a very successful life himself, Doug Glanville has a keen sense of tragedy. His guest piece in the New York Times last week—about number-one draft pick/injury victim/felony crack dealer Brien Taylor—is a sober meditation on what Glanville calls the “illusion of inevitability.” It is also really good. Taylor was a prodigy pitcher drafted out of high school, who tore through batters in the minor leagues until he injured his shoulder during an altercation between his brother and another man in a trailer park. Glanville was a Penn graduate drafted sixteenth, who has gone on to a successful career in commenting and analysis. He also has one hell of a sense of perspective:

I guess I don’t see a big difference between Brien Taylor and me, or Brien Taylor and any of those other players chosen at the top of the draft. Every player, whenever he stops playing and for whatever reason, feels the same thing, because we’ve all been living a passion whose only true inevitability is that it will end.

Damn.

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Regarding Ann Romney, Olympic horse owner

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 5 Comments

John Carlos and Tommie Smith give the black power salute at the 1968 Olympics, humiliating their owners.

Michelle Obama has those arms, but Ann Romney is kind of an Olympian. She owns a dressage horse, Rafalca, who will compete in the 2012 Summer Games in London alongside trainer Jan Ebeling. Over at the New Yorker, Amy Davidson asks whether that means we have to cheer for Ann Romney at the Olympics. We definitely have to cheer Rafalca, because what—am I to root for some Russian horse instead? But the question of whether that equals cheering for Ann Romney is less clear. Eberling is the one who actually rides Rafalca, putting Romney at another degree of remove from even being the person who sits on top of the actual competitor. It’s a tricky way to be an Olympian, as Mitt Romney has acknowledged. “She’s the athlete,” he told Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation. “But in this case, it’s not her personally.” Oh.

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