Combat! - Page 270 of 406 - A blog by Dan Brooks

Can we talk about this hipster racism article?

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media May 2, 2012 13 Comments

Heil hipsters

There is something wrong with Matt Pearce’s brain. I know because I read his article in the Los Angeles Times about hipster racism, which is apparently now a real thing. By real thing, I mean imagined thing reported extensively as an epiphenomenon of our own awareness of it. If that sounds maybe kind of abstract, it’s because it totally is. Educated young people are still racist, but hipster racism is an abstract noun modified by a made-up adjective. It’s like when you try to read a clock in a dream: the closer you look at it, the blurrier it gets. Consider the lead paragraph of Pearce’s article:

The Trayvon Martin case, the”Kony 2012″ phenomenon, the L.A. riots anniversary…The conversation about race in America never went away. Now a new discussion about so-called hipster racism has brought the talk to the millennials, and it’s gotten a little awkward.

I’m so angry right now.

Andrew Sullivan is very angry at 60 Minutes

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse May 1, 2012 4 Comments

Former CIA Director of National Clandestine Service Jose Rodriguez

Andrew Sullivan begins his screed against Jose Rodriguez and the 60 Minutes producer who blew his chance to ask him if he was maybe a war criminal with some bold assumptions. “There are a couple of things worth knowing about Jose Rodriguez,” Sullivan writes: “that he is a war criminal and that he destroyed the evidence that would prove it without a doubt. The third thing you need to know is that he has no shame about any of this and intends to make money off it.” That’s a good list, but it’s incomplete. It is also worth knowing about Jose Rodriguez that he was Director of the National Clandestine Service of the CIA in 2005, when it destroyed video evidence of waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” conducted at a CIA prison in Thailand in 2002. Yes, the CIA has a prison in Thailand, and yes, they waste videotapes there. Rodriguez was also D/NCS in 2007, when people found out about that. Now he is on a book tour, and he has “no regrets.” For example, he does not regret destroying the evidence of what he did.

Washington Post: “Republicans are the problem”

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government April 30, 2012 2 Comments

I think most of us would agree that the federal government does not work as well as it could just now. For example, if you regard 86% of Americans as “most of us,” you might be troubled by the 14% approval rating of Congress. Politicians are rascals, and the two parties vie for control of the United States government in the same way two cats vie for control of a woodpecker. Except what if—stay with me here—the parties were not precisely equal participants in villainy? What if the vying were between one admittedly inept woodpecker biologist and a cat? That is the essential contention of Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein at the Washington Post, who get to this bold statement by the third paragraph:

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

It’s a heck of a read.

Friday links! Unchecked misanthropy edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links, Uncategorized April 27, 2012 14 Comments

In a contemporary weltanschauung that has pretty much abandoned temptation narratives, misanthropy still exercises an evil allure. You must resist. Misanthropy is a sin in the classic sense, in that it feels really good now but will make you feel bad later, and in the long run it will wreck your life. You cannot succumb to it, lest you start treating new people as crises instead of opportunities. Yet evidence for misanthropy’s central proposition is all around—I would say the United States contains about 300 million supporting arguments—and the internet documents it for us in lurid detail. It’s Friday, Missoula has gone from dazzling sun to 40-degree rain, and the temptation to regard everyone as crappy runs high. Like Christ on the temple roof, we must refuse. But also like C on the T-R, we are allowed to get really close. Won’t you maybe indulge just a little with me?

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is awesome, you guys

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas April 26, 2012 11 Comments

Graphs, graphs graphs! The robot's art

Judge Holden, the rad Satan figure in Cormac McCarthy’s rad hallucinatory western Blood Meridian, observes that “everything that exists without my knowledge exists without my permission.” A palpable satisfaction comes from naming things, particularly when those things are familiar but somehow yet nameless. Hence the beauty of schadenfreude, or the French expression for thinking of a witty comeback after the moment has passed, esprit d’escalier—”the spirit of the stairs.” Such terms are pleasing because they identify things we recognize but which previously blended into the larger field; they quantify experiences out of the miasma of life. I was therefore extremely pleased, yesterday, when I ran across the Dunning-Kruger Effect: the tendency of underskilled individuals to rate their abilities much higher than average, for precisely the same reasons that they are underskilled.