Spam blocker mailbag

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 6 Comments

Here at Combat! blog, we pride ourselves on the quality of our Comments section. Pound for pound, critical thought for critical thought, Combat! commenters are not only physically attractive but mentally acute. I attribute it to either the strength of our public school system or Aksimet, the WordPress plugin that blocks the literally dozens of spam comments made on each post every day. Occasionally, Aksimet will mistake one of you fine people for a Russian Viagra robot, which means I periodically go through the spam folder to check for comments from actual humans. This morning, I realized that my policy of only approving comments from sentient beings is totally bigoted, so I thought I’d take a moment to answer some questions from those members of the Combat! audience who can perform 1.7 billion operations per second. I call it Spam Blocker Mailbag, and it begins…now!

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Hey, check out what it’s legal to do now

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 8 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZ3B8WvVjL4

That masterpiece of American democracy was created by Turn Right USA with the help of “filmmaker” Ladd Ehlinger, Jr, perhaps best known for producing Dale “Get Away From That!” Peterson’s Alabama Ag commissioner ad in 2010. You can tell it’s a Ladd because there’s a gun in it. The subject of this advertisement—probably “object” is the more appropriate word—is Janice Hahn, a Los Angeles City Council member currently running for Congress. In 2008, an LA Fox affiliate ran an investigative piece about the city’s use of “gang intervention specialists”—former gang members who served as liaisons among police, community organizations and gangs—that accused Hahn of paying gang members and pulling strings to get them out of jail. You should probably know that it turns out that didn’t actually happen. Also, the rappers featured in this video are called the Splack Pack, in case you want to book them for your daughter’s bat mitzvah.

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Scientists suggest that reason evolved to win arguments

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 4 Comments

"But if you believe that after you die you will go to heaven and join the kitten, and you are wrong, you lose nothing."

First of all, that is one handsome bonobo. You could easily put him in a movie where he has to plan Cameron Diaz’s wedding to a mean investment banker and she falls in love with him, only to have her arms twisted out of the sockets when they can’t agree on who gets to eat an orange peel. Anywhom, we’re thinking about chimps/Cameron Diaz because of this New York Times article, in which various scientists claim that human beings developed reasoning to win arguments rather than to discern the truth. Those of you who have exhausted your meager allotment of Times stories can read one of the original scholarly articles. I quote from the abstract:

Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given the exceptional dependence of humans on communication and their vulnerability to misinformation.

Oh shit.

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Ed Schultz calls Laura Ingraham “a slut”

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 2 Comments

Ed Schultz calling his desk a "thick brown harlot."

Because I need to be able to go to sleep, I watch MSNBC as little as possible. My facade of openminded centrism is flimsy enough without the voice of Keith Olbermann in my head, analyzing politics in the exact same way he analyzed sports. I therefore barely understand who Ed Schultz is. He appears to be a liberal—sorry, “progressive”—iteration of Rush Limbaugh: a jolly but vaguely menacing fat man who yells the truth at you, assuming you already know everything that’s true. He is also the man who, on his Tuesday show, referred to conservative commentator Laura Ingraham as a “right-wing slut.” For the purposes of the discussion to follow, I ask you to accept two premises:

1) She is pretty tasty.

2) This is worse for Ed Schultz than it would have been for Rush Limbaugh.

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Anthony Weiner runs Congressional Correspondents Dinner

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 2 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fj_yProUnEI&feature=player_embedded#at=678

That, dear friends, is US Representative Anthony Weiner (D–NY, net worth $108k) laying it in there like an old pro—okay, like a gifted amateur—at the Congressional Correspondents Dinner. The CCD is to the White House Correspondents Dinner as Congress is to the White House, which is to say as Larry Wilmore is to Stephen Colbert.* And yet Weiner rose to the occasion, delivering a series of remarks re: his own name even better than that one—at one point he pleaded with John Boehner, “Come on, brother, I’m not Anthony Way-ner”—mocking CNN’s declining ratings, and gradually isolating Rand Paul until Weiner was examining his every response like Don Rickles. He also showed a picture of himself looking eerily like Horschach from Welcome Back, Kotter. In short, he was funny—which when you think about it is kind of surprising, considering that Weiner is a rising star in possibly the least funny political organization in American history.

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