Combat! - Page 261 of 406 - A blog by Dan Brooks

Friday links! Heady concepts edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links July 6, 2012 2 Comments

The presidential sash has since been retired.

Consider for a moment how much more complex our world is than the one in which our ancestors lived. The physical environment is roughly the same—albeit with abortion protestors where burning witches used to be—but our interpretation of that world is far more nuanced. Prose fiction, classical physics, the germ theory of disease, moral relativism, environmental stewardship, being cool—all these concepts overlay one another to make the modern world stand in relation to the past as an origami crane relates to a sheet of paper. It’s Friday, and the more you know the more improbable that seems. Today’s link roundup is full of fine writing and heady concepts, plus fungus. Won’t you deepen the manifold with me?

Jesus Christ, Doug Glanville

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas July 5, 2012 2 Comments

Former Cub/Philly and startlingly good writer Doug Glanville

For a man who has led a very successful life himself, Doug Glanville has a keen sense of tragedy. His guest piece in the New York Times last week—about number-one draft pick/injury victim/felony crack dealer Brien Taylor—is a sober meditation on what Glanville calls the “illusion of inevitability.” It is also really good. Taylor was a prodigy pitcher drafted out of high school, who tore through batters in the minor leagues until he injured his shoulder during an altercation between his brother and another man in a trailer park. Glanville was a Penn graduate drafted sixteenth, who has gone on to a successful career in commenting and analysis. He also has one hell of a sense of perspective:

I guess I don’t see a big difference between Brien Taylor and me, or Brien Taylor and any of those other players chosen at the top of the draft. Every player, whenever he stops playing and for whatever reason, feels the same thing, because we’ve all been living a passion whose only true inevitability is that it will end.

Damn.

Is the ZANU-PF Twitter account a hoax?

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media July 3, 2012 1 Comment

An effigy of Robert Mugabe in Johannesburg’s Gay Pride parade

Yesterday in the comments, Willy pointed out that a lot of people think the @ZANU_PF Twitter account is fake. “Fake” in this context means “not originating from officials of ZANU-PF”—the ruling political party of Zimbabwe headed by dictatorial octogenarian Robert Mugabe—and in this case it is mostly an aesthetic judgment. Back in April, @ZANU-PF seemed to be fueling rumors of Mugabe’s death, an odd choice for the mouthpiece of a party that spends a lot of time insisting its leader is totally healthy. The use of the appellation Cde (for comrade) before everybody’s name seems like something out of screwball comedy, too. Then again, the previous president of Zimbabwe was named Canaan Banana, so who knows what the fudge is going on?

The terrible pleasures of ZANU-PF’s Twitter

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media July 2, 2012 2 Comments

Robert Mugabe with the mustache that proves he has no genuine friends

On Friday I mentioned the Twitter feed of ZANU-PF, which Robert Mugabe has put to such purposes as apologizing to Zimbabweans killed by his motorcade. The collision of Mugabe and social networking makes for a complicated mix of the horrifying and the frivolous, like when a clown drives drunk. As Morgan Tsvangirai will tell you, Mugabe is a brutal dictator. At 90, he is the last of the generation that shook off colonial rule in Africa. He is terrible at actually running his country, however, and Zimbabwe has spent the last ten years in the grip of a stunning economic crisis that has featured, along with the famines, several consecutive years of multi-hundred-percent inflation. ZANU-PF is killing Zimbabwe, both in spirit and in traffic, which makes their Twitter feed problematically hilarious.

Friday links! Audacity of jerks edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links June 29, 2012 3 Comments

Costa Rica uses a government-funded, single-payer health care system.

I don’t know about you, but I would like to be liked. I may not be very good at it, but in my interpersonal relations I try to pander to others as much as possible. Shame and sycophancy are my watchwords. The panicked need to feel that other people like me—even when I do not like them—exerts a serious check on my behavior. Imagine how free I would be if everyone hated me. If there were no hope that anyone who knew me could possibly like me, I could act however I pleased, the way death row inmates are always filling balloons with their own feces. If I were a public jerk instead of a secret asshole, I could live a life of rare liberty, saying and doing whatever I pleased with no regard for decency or the feelings of others. Today is Friday, and our link roundup contains a bunch of people like that.