Friday links! Economic forces edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 6 Comments

Graphs, graphs graphs! First of all, I don’t get punished for using a spectacularly uninteresting visual image for my header, because you are already looking at this page. All your hits are belong to us. Second, that image is actually totally interesting. Had I not cropped out the title, you would know that it plots the percentage of total US pre-tax income—including capital gains—garnered by the wealthiest one percent of earners. A lot of people have said that the interesting thing is its impressive upward trend right around 1980, when America began the long fight to make the Laffer Curve a legitimate conceptual instrument. I personally think the interesting thing is the locations of its two highest peaks, in 1929 and 2007, respectively. I’m not saying economics is a science, but maybe there’s some sort of principle at work there. It’s Friday, and today’s link roundup is all about weirdo economic phenomena, plus judo highlights and a book review. I’m not entirely stupid.

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Friday links! Visceral revulsion edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 2 Comments

The original cutline for this picture was "David Brooks unpacks new insights into human nature."

We like to think of ourselves as clear-eyed realists around here, but as often as not, reason is the scaffolding that holds up raw instinct. You can’t use impartial logic for everything, after all. When you see a nest of scorpions or Newt Gingrich or whatever, you don’t start from first principles and follow reason until it brings you to your opinion; you throw bleach on it and get out of there. I’m speaking metaphorically, here—don’t get close enough to Newt Gingrich to throw bleach on him. The point is that our opinions may be enforced with logical reasoning, but the original dictate tends to come from our guts. That’s all well and good when our opinions our ours alone, but the system breaks down when we have to match opinions with one another. One man’s visceral revulsion is another man’s career. It’s Friday, and this week’s link roundup is all about the problem of things that are A) intuitively, obviously wrong and B) going to keep happening until we can find some airtight argument against them.

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Friday links! Power of speech edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 6 Comments

Humans are the only animal with the power of speech. That’s probably good, since you don’t want the dog following you around saying hey, are you hungry? all day. It’s also not really true; lots of animals communicate with sound, from birds to monkeys to weirdo meerkats. But man is the animal whose speech moves through time. We talk not just about whether we see a big snake but also about the time we saw it, about what it means that things were once one way they were and how they should be in the future. The meerkat has little idea of should. Talking is rad, is what I’m saying here, even when other people do it. Today is Friday, I have a brand new bite plate and attendant speech impediment, and I’ve also got some bang-on links re: the power of speech. Won’t you stare silently at a screen with me?

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Friday links! Just sayin’ stuff edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 3 Comments

Billionaire grandpa Foster Friess, wearing his Santorum for President sweater vest

Every schoolchild knows the fundamental lesson of George Orwell’s novel 1984: language is a tool for convincing people or whatever. Since reasoning is conducted via language,* it therefore follows that reasoning is also a tool for convincing people or whatever. And since reason is a matter of opinion,** language is clearly a tool for doing whatever with whatever. It’s the great American tradition of Just Sayin’ Stuff, which as near as I can tell began in 1968. Regardless, it has reached its apotheosis in the present day. We all know what we think about everything now, so the use of language as a means to disseminate and preserve true propositions is kind of old-fashioned. This week’s link roundup is full of people who use words for something other than that. They’re Just Sayin’ Stuff, and don’t worry—they’re all billionaires or congressmen or law enforcement officials. Plus some jerkoff who likes books.

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Friday links! To my old master edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 2 Comments

Escaped slaves in Virginia, 1862. The baby in this picture is 150 years old.

It is a known fact that a lot of assholes have more power than you. Mitch McConnell, Ke$ha, Pat Robertson, bone loss, the fundamental economic problem, Steven Tyler, tooth decay—pretty much any of them could, at a whim, do things to your life that you could not undo. The forces arrayed above us are mind-boggling. Think of your boss at work, and then try to think of every person who could pay him to fire you. The situation is terrifying. Paradoxically, even though most of it is because people arranged everything before you got here, it will only get worse as you age. Until right at the end. Right at the end, you will attain to a position where no one has any power over you whatsoever. In the meantime, you can say whatever you want. It’s Friday, the weekend approaches as Sherman approached the sea, and they’ve got the guns but we are funnier. Historical primary source document after the jump.

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