Combat! - Page 182 of 406 - A blog by Dan Brooks

Is it okay to like Woody Allen movies now?

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized February 13, 2014 2 Comments

Is this the face of a child molester?

Obviously, we should all stop watching Woody Allen movies if we believe that he molested Dylan Farrow. It therefore follows that if you plan to watch “Blue Jasmine,” you believe that Farrow is lying or the victim of false memories implanted by her mother. Those are your two options. To say that we don’t know whether Farrow is telling the truth and to continue watching Woody Allen movies is to introduce an alarming moral calculus—to measure the quality of “Annie Hall” against the possibility that he molested a child, and then say probably everything is fine. Until we can figure out the truth of Dylan Farrow’s accusations for ourselves, we conscionably can neither watch nor stop watching Woody Allen movies, unless we advance the tenuous argument that art and the artist have nothing to do with each other. Basically we are screwed, is what I am saying here, from both a moral and an epistemological standpoint. That’s also what I say in this consideration of the problem in the Missoula Independent, which is what you get instead of a blog today. Click through, mickey-fickeys.

Shia LaBeouf opens passive-aggressive art installation

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse February 12, 2014 4 Comments

Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete of Vice

Even though he tweeted “I AM NOT FAMOUS ANYMORE” three times in a row last week, Shia LaBeouf cannot put Beetlejuice back in the model. We know who he is, and we are interested in what he does—not in the good way anymore, where we want to see him be friends with a transforming robot, but in the other way where we cannot believe what a schmuck he is. According to Vice, LaBeouf is spending this week doing “some kind of super artsy thing” in LA. First, props to The Angel Ben Gabriel for the link, and second, I believe the word for some kind of super artsy thing is “art.” In keeping with Monsieur LaBeouf’s recent work, the art on offer seems passive aggressive in the extreme.

“Dumb Starbucks” less funny ha-ha, more funny legal ramifications

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media February 11, 2014 1 Comment

Dumb Starbucks, a mysterious coffee shop that opened in Los Feliz last weekend, was a prank by Nathan Fielder.

Dumb Starbucks, a kind of prank by Nathan Fielder.

It turns out that Dumb Starbucks, the mysterious coffeeshop that opened in a Los Feliz strip mall this weekend, was in fact a hilarious prank by comedy central show-haver Nathan Fielder. Here we use “hilarious” in its strict sense, to mean “funnier than an LA Times headline, I guess.” Basically, Fielder opened a coffee store that was almost identical to Starbucks except A) all the drinks were free, B) the word “dumb” appeared in front of them—dumb iced coffee, dumb frappuccino, et cetera, and C) it wasn’t inspected by the health department. LA County shut down Dumb Starbucks for item (C), but I’m more interested in what the parody store says about fair use.

“Phony experts on retainer” at Employment Policy Institute

By Dan Brooks in Epistemology February 10, 2014 3 Comments

Thirty year-old Michael Saltsman, director of research for the Employment Policy Institute, whose face is gradually becoming evil

Michael Saltsman, director of research for the Employment Policy Institute, gradually becoming evil

Michael Saltsman has an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Michigan, which qualifies him to be director of research at Employment Policy Institute. You may recognize EPI from virtually every argument over whether to raise the federal minimum wage, or from this New York Times article accusing it of being a purely political operation. The nonprofit has no full-time employees and pays 44% of its budget to the advertising firm Berman and Company, with which it shares an office. EPI pays Berman employees for the time they spend working on its research and advocacy programs, and it spends the rest of its budget on advertising. By all indications, EPI is a full-time disinformation-producing machine.

Friday links! Trust not the internet edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links February 7, 2014 0 Comment

A fox and a magpie make out on the medieval internet.

There must have been some point when the internet was a reliable source. The first time someone was lied to over the internet—probably in 1979, when Al Gore had to enter each new email address manually—it was like getting lied to in a letter. Then there was a long time when finding a lie on the internet was approximately as scandalous as finding a lie in the newspaper. Your aunt still lives in this time. The rest of us now encounter falsehood on the internet as a feature of the medium. Today is Friday, and nothing you read on this screen is necessarily true. Won’t you make the classic blunder with me?