George Zimmerman to box DMX for “charity”

By Dan Brooks in Here Is Your American Culture 2 Comments
George Zimmerman prepares to make the second-worst mistake of his life.

George Zimmerman prepares to make the second-worst mistake of his life.

First of all, eff CNN for the lede of this story, which is not only unfunny but also applicable to pretty much any story about anything anywhere. The ellipses don’t help. Second, props to A. Ron Galbraith for again sending me a delightful link. And third, is it really such a good idea for George Zimmerman to box DMX? Obviously its a bad idea for America as a culture, but it also seems to be a bad idea for Zimmerman, who two years ago was taken down an badly beaten by an opponent he outweighed by 70 pounds. Plus DMX has announced that he intends to pee on him.

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Richard Sherman: “thug” is acceptable n-word

By Dan Brooks in Here Is Your American Culture 5 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPD_Lgq7IyI

By now you have probably seen Richard Sherman’s postgame interview, shot seconds after he tipped an end zone pass to his teammate and won the NFC championship for the Seattle Seahawks. Due to my jet-setter lifestyle, I heard about this video for days before I actually saw it, and the real thing was kind of anticlimactic. Sherman has a rad voice—presumably from yelling on football fields for ten years straight—and he criticizes Michael Crabtree, whom he is rumored to dislike. Mostly, he declares himself the best cornerback in the game. It’s kind of unseemly and kind of awesome, as human beings in celebration are. It also led a bunch of commenters to call him a thug. On Thursday, Sherman opined that “thug” is an acceptable way of calling a black man the n-word.

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Express your hatred for Xbox as a fetish object

By Dan Brooks in Here Is Your American Culture 2 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kY_mhaGHqo0

Don’t watch this video at work. It’s not inappropriate in sexual or violent ways, but there is something unsettling about a POV hand packing meat into an Xbox. Props to Smick for the link, and I forgive him for ruining cantaloupes forever. This video raises an obvious question: what the fuck? It turns out that anti-Xbox videos are a whole microgenre of internet content. Some of it stems from aggressive digital rights management policies that have ostensibly been repealed. Most of it, though, appears to be a consequence of the console wars.

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Is our economy hostile to the humanities?

By Dan Brooks in Here Is Your American Culture 1 Comment
Wouldn't you rather watch this than a movie?

Wouldn’t you rather watch this than a movie?

Probably you scoffed at the headline of this post. Obviously, our contemporary economy is hostile to the humanities insofar as they include theatre and dance and, I dunno, edifying lectures on the origin of species. But from another perspective, culture is perhaps the most robust sector of the American economy. Pace niche competition from Bollywood and Chinese movies about kicking people, our film and television is the world’s film and television. Our music is the world’s music. These sentences will be included in a themed collection of Combat! blog posts that made Mose angry, but for the most part the United States has the strongest culture economy on Earth. But is our culture anywhere for a humanist to make a living?

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Daniel Duane asks if it’s okay to kill cyclists

By Dan Brooks in Here Is Your American Culture 8 Comments
A multi-cycle pileup results in zero deaths.

A multi-cycle pileup results in zero deaths.

The executive director of the San Francisco Bicycling Coalition does not know of “a single case” in which a driver who killed a cyclist has been prosecuted, except for DUIs and hit-and-runs. If you’re not drunk and you stay on the scene, you can pretty much run over every cyclist you see. In 2011, a teenager ran over a 49 year-old cyclist from behind, killing him, and was fined $42. In San Francisco last year, Amelie Le Moullac was in the bike lane when a delivery truck turned right and killed her. Police initially assumed it was Le Moullac’s fault, until surveillance video showed the truck driver turning through the bike lane in front of her at unsafe speed. Although the SFPD has acknowledged that the driver was at fault, no charges have been filed.

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