Combat! - Page 103 of 406 - A blog by Dan Brooks

Why Nick Diaz’s suspension is a big deal

By Dan Brooks in Fighting September 15, 2015 0 Comment

Nick Diaz submits Takanori Gomi via gogoplata in 2007. His win would be overturned following a failed drug test.

Yesterday, the Nevada State Athletic Commission suspended Nick Diaz for five years and fined him $150,000 for failing a drug test after his January bout against Anderson Silva. Diaz tested positive for marijuana metabolites. His opponent tested positive for anabolic steroids and was suspended one year. The asymmetry between these punishments is not as clear as it may seem: Diaz has tested positive for marijuana twice before, in 2007 and 2012. That might be because he has a medical card in California, where he lives, but whatever the reason, Diaz smokes a lot of weed. As of yesterday afternoon, that seems to be the central problem in his life.

Slate on the “first-person industrial complex”

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media September 14, 2015 0 Comment

The top of a Jezebel story whose original headline was "I bed Dad."

The top of a Jezebel story whose original headline was presumably “I bed Dad.”

Laura Bennett has written an interesting piece on the microgenre of harrowing first-person essays, which has become a distinctive and popular type of internet writing over the last few years. Bennett knows of what she speaks: as a senior editor at Slate, she reads and often helps produce such work. But she also worries that the confessional essay appeals to inexperienced or emerging writers who maybe don’t appreciate the ramifications of publishing a clickbait essay about, for example, fucking their dads.

Friday links! Something I was supposed to remember today edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links September 11, 2015 2 Comments

Saddam Hussein was not technically involved in 9/11, but you know he liked it.

“It was unquestionably the most terrible day of our age,” begins a News.com.au article headlined 30 pictures of 9/11 that show you why you should never forget. Fourteen years after I noticed the World Trade Center was on fire on my way to work, it’s still impossible to listen to other people talk about it. September 11th changed all our lives forever, according to a bunch of people who saw it on the news. Unquestionably, it was the most terrible day of our age, says an uncredited photo aggregator who was not at Hiroshima. Never forget, say people who remember where they were when they heard that a plane hit the World Trade Center, and it wasn’t lower Manhattan. Today is Friday, and events don’t have to happen to you to affect you deeply. It’s probably better they don’t. Won’t you survey tragedy from a safe remove with me?

Missoula County Sheriff declines to comment on damning investigation, and I’m in the Times

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized September 10, 2015 5 Comments

Missoula County Sheriff TJ McDermott, who has never been photographed with Banksy

Good news, everybody: a Human Rights Bureau investigation has found that Missoula County Sheriff TJ McDermott really did discriminate against former undersheriff and political rival Josh Clark. Wait—that’s not good news at all. Nor is it good news that McDermott offered no comment on investigator Josh Manning’s report, which included this paragraph:

The investigator was troubled throughout this process by the petty personal attacks both parties used to color the way the Bureau would look at the people involved and left those details out of the report. It did not paint a good portrait of the people responsible for the public safety of one of Montana’s most populous counties.

The report also notes that the two deputies McDermott promoted to captain upon taking office were the two largest donors to his campaign. The sheriff referred all questions to his lawyer, County Attorney Erica Grinde, who said they would withhold comment until the matter had been resolved. From an outsider’s perspective, though, the conclusion of the HRB investigation looks a lot like resolution—at least a resolution of the question, “Did the sheriff do that thing he said he didn’t do?” Yeah—it appears he did. He should at least acknowledge that the outcome of this investigation is significant by talking to reporters about it.

If this leads to some kind of settlement—and it almost certainly will—then it will be the fourth settlement for political discrimination the sheriff’s department has paid out in the last two years. One of them went to McDermott himself, in 2013. It seems like maybe this county agency is operating on the spoils system. You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent.

After you read that, why don’t you bop on over to the New York Times Magazine and read my essay about Banksy, sarcasm and kitsch? That’s the actual good news today, and I’m very excited about it. I think this one captures something I’ve been trying to articulate about how we use the word “sarcasm” online, be it in news-aggregator sites, memes, or Ok Cupid profiles. I think sarcasm is our kitsch. That’s the kind of statement I consider bold and exciting, but maybe the internet is not as concerned as I am with our emotional relationships to various categories of art. Still, “Banksy and the Problem With Sarcastic Art” is total clickbait. Click it up, sluts. Why don’t you try sharing it, so we can both be smug early adopters when it goes viral?

Sherman Alexie responds to Yi-Fen Chou kerfuffle

By Dan Brooks in Ethical Dilemmas September 9, 2015 10 Comments

Unlucky poetry judge Sherman Alexie

Yesterday, we learned that Michael Derrick Hudson has a poem in Best American Poetry 2015 he submitted under the pen name Yi-Fen Chou. Ben al-Fowlkes sent me Sherman Alexie’s explanation of how that happened, which I like as much as anything he’s written in years. Alexie wisely begins from his own perspective as a writer, which is the familiar mix of high ideals, envy, and conspiracy theory. I find contest judges are unfairly biased in favor of writers who aren’t me. Alexie feels about the same way, albeit for better reasons than I do, and when he becomes guest editor of BAP 2015 he resolves to judge fairly. He also resolves to uphold Rule #5:

Rule #5: I will pay close attention to the poets and poems that have been underrepresented in the past. So that means I will carefully look for great poems by women and people of color. [snip]

Enter Yi-Fen Chou. Alexie read his poem carefully and thought it was great. After he picked it for the anthology and Michael Derrick Hudson unmasked himself, Alexie was enraged. Then he read the poem again and liked it just as much, so it stayed in.