Combat! - Page 274 of 406 - A blog by Dan Brooks

Annals of Lying: Priest’s PC autoplays gay porn during presentation

By Dan Brooks in lying April 4, 2012 2 Comments

Father Martin McVeigh, who has no idea how gay pornography even got on his computer.

Once, when I worked as a tutor for prep school kids, one of my students woke his laptop from sleep and went to use the bathroom while it was starting up. Pretty much as soon as he left the room, the computer began playing blowjob footage—grainy and extremely loud, in that sensory-assault style where pornography meets the industrial film. I went for command-Q like a damn mongoose, only to get the spinning beach ball, at which point I panicked and shut the clamshell. That was no good, of course; my student would inevitably return, open it and have even more reason to assume I had fired up the hardcore porn while he was gone. I woke the laptop and waited for Closeup Wailing Blowjob 6 to start again—watching the bathroom door in terror the whole time—and then did a hard shutdown. My point is A) no pun and B) even the shrewd tactician is at a loss when a machine suddenly begins emitting pornography. I can understand why Father Martin McVeigh of Pomeroy, Ireland just got the fuck out of there.

Antonin Scalia is not going to read the whole Affordable Care Act

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government April 3, 2012 8 Comments

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says the word "diligence."

The Supreme Court is hearing arguments on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, so it’s time for another edition of Kombat! Kourt for Kids. In today’s meeting of the KK—dammit! Okay, Kombat! Kourt for Kids is now called Kombat? Judiciary for Kids, and today’s meeting of K?JK is about Antonin Scalia. He is still waiting for someone to bring him Solo and the Wookie. He also did not realize that being a Supreme Court justice would require so much reading. In an exchange with Deputy Solicitor Edwin Kneedler last week, Scalia expressed his incredulity that people might expect him to read the entire Affordable Care Act before ruling on it. “Is this not totally unrealistic?” Scalia said. “That we’re going to go through this enormous bill item by item and decide each one?”

Two acts of aesthetic morality

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas April 2, 2012 6 Comments

Charles Snelling, who killed his wife and then himself after Alzheimer's Disease concluded their 60-year marriage, and Robert Wilkinson, who sang "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the back of a squad car (at right)

With today’s post headline, Combat! blog abandons all hope of attracting a general audience. If you have read this far, you are animated by a loyalty that most of the internet simply does not possess. Tomorrow we’re changing the format to nothing but videos of cats falling into toilets,* so I figured we’d use today to consider the ontology of morals. On Friday, the New York Times ran what was perhaps the most approving murder-suicide story ever. Charles Snelling, who in December wrote an essay describing his six-decade marriage to Adrienne Snelling and the Alzheimer’s Disease that consumed her last five years, killed his wife and then shot himself. Also last week, the internet became enraptured by video of a drunk man singing Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” in its entirety while locked in the back of a RCMP squad car. Everyone considered both these acts profound expressions of the human spirit.

Friday links! Visceral revulsion edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links March 30, 2012 2 Comments

The original cutline for this picture was "David Brooks unpacks new insights into human nature."

We like to think of ourselves as clear-eyed realists around here, but as often as not, reason is the scaffolding that holds up raw instinct. You can’t use impartial logic for everything, after all. When you see a nest of scorpions or Newt Gingrich or whatever, you don’t start from first principles and follow reason until it brings you to your opinion; you throw bleach on it and get out of there. I’m speaking metaphorically, here—don’t get close enough to Newt Gingrich to throw bleach on him. The point is that our opinions may be enforced with logical reasoning, but the original dictate tends to come from our guts. That’s all well and good when our opinions our ours alone, but the system breaks down when we have to match opinions with one another. One man’s visceral revulsion is another man’s career. It’s Friday, and this week’s link roundup is all about the problem of things that are A) intuitively, obviously wrong and B) going to keep happening until we can find some airtight argument against them.

Smug News: Racist Hunger Games fans

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media March 29, 2012 4 Comments

Amandla Stenberg as Rue in The Hunger Games

I have not seen The Hunger Games, because it has too many children in it. Granted, my understanding of the film is that those children are killing and possibly eating one another, which is nice, but narrative convention dictates that they will still be alive and talking for several minutes of screen time. That’s no good. But I can still enjoy the many, many internet articles produced in conjunction with the film, not the least of which is the news that racist Hunger Games fans were disappointed to find black actors playing several of the main characters. Never mind that those characters are described as having “dark skin” in the books; they’re characters in books, for Pete’s sake, and books are where you find white people the same way the library is where you find bums. Obviously, the fans foolish enough to tweet their disappointment at such faithful casting are stone-cold racists. The question of why their racism is a news story—and an incredibly popular one, at that—is less clear.