Combat! - Page 280 of 406 - A blog by Dan Brooks

Friday links! Just sayin’ stuff edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links February 17, 2012 3 Comments

Billionaire grandpa Foster Friess, wearing his Santorum for President sweater vest

Every schoolchild knows the fundamental lesson of George Orwell’s novel 1984: language is a tool for convincing people or whatever. Since reasoning is conducted via language,* it therefore follows that reasoning is also a tool for convincing people or whatever. And since reason is a matter of opinion,** language is clearly a tool for doing whatever with whatever. It’s the great American tradition of Just Sayin’ Stuff, which as near as I can tell began in 1968. Regardless, it has reached its apotheosis in the present day. We all know what we think about everything now, so the use of language as a means to disseminate and preserve true propositions is kind of old-fashioned. This week’s link roundup is full of people who use words for something other than that. They’re Just Sayin’ Stuff, and don’t worry—they’re all billionaires or congressmen or law enforcement officials. Plus some jerkoff who likes books.

Never forget to not kill yourself

By Dan Brooks in Narrative Watch February 16, 2012 5 Comments

A great place to make yourself an unimpeachable spectacle of grief

I am officially not a New Yorker anymore, since A) I don’t live there and B) the city has added a tourist attraction since I left. The Astor Place Building was bad enough, but now that the 9/11 memorial is finished I have to accept that my mental map of the city is not only imprecise, like a dream, but inaccurate, like the dream where Catherine Keener says I’m pretty. It’s fitting that it should happen this way. The September 11th attacks—more specifically, the baffling torrent of people who did not live in the city on September 11, 2001 but still consider 9/11 a personal tragedy—were what made me feel like a New Yorker in the first place. The feeling is an odd mixture of loyalty and cynicism, which you can simulate for yourself after the jump by reading a quote from this New York Times article.

Rick Santorum and the aristocratic mode

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates February 15, 2012 1 Comment

Good morning, dicks!

Clearly god exists, because Rick Santorum is the front-runner for the Republican nomination. He’ll do really well in the general, too, except for with women, homosexuals, hispanics, people on public assistance, recipients of student loans, libertarians and atheists. But he’s got the white male Christian high school graduate vote sewed up. If you draw a Venn diagram of all the bias groups in the United States—straight, Christian, male, dumb—the region where they overlap is the Santorum constituency. It’s a group that defines itself by what it is not, and the word for what it is not is elite. Santorum gave us a usage example yesterday, when he described the Obama administration to his audience at a campaign rally:

They don’t believe that you can make these decisions. They need to make these decisions for you…Don’t you see how they see you? How they look down their nose at the average American. These elite snobs.

Props to Ben al-Fowlkes for the link.

I choo choo choose to die alone

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas February 14, 2012 7 Comments

Okay, so it’s not a choi choi choice exactly, but it seems to be where we’re headed. Today is Valentine’s Day. If we had the instruments to measure such things, I suspect we would find that ironic observances account for the majority celebration of same. As any single person will tell you, Valentine’s Day is fake. It is a construct designed to sell flowers and prix fixe dinners—as opposed to Christmas and May Day, which are totally real. Exactly who conspired to create Valentine’s Day and market it across multiple industries against the will of Earth’s people remains unclear. Probably, she is pretty and wants watermelon. Possibly she does not really exist.

Florida legislator submits bill with ALEC mission statement still attached

By Dan Brooks in corporatocracy February 13, 2012 3 Comments

Florida law-forwarder Rachel Burgin

A useful idea from economic theory is commodification, the process by which things that were previously not sold become accepted objects of economic exchange. Commodification is kind of a weird concept for contemporary Americans, since pretty much every aspect of our lives has been commodified already. Consider, though, the commodity that is clothing; for centuries, most people made their own, until rising incomes and better manufacturing in the early 19th century made it easier to buy them from somebody else. Degree of commodification is a good measure of the development of an economy. During the middle ages, for example, Europeans did not buy or sell land—one reason their economy stagnated for a millenium. Compared to those assholes, our economy is fantastic. Just last month, for example, a Florida legislator submitted a law drafted by corporate lobbying group the American Legislative Exchange Council, word for word, without remembering to delete ALEC’s mission statement from the top.