Combat! - Page 323 of 406 - A blog by Dan Brooks

Belief in free will correlates with honesty, hard work

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas March 23, 2011 2 Comments

This post has nothing to do with the Gil Scott Heron album. You'll just have to wait until tomorrow, I guess.

Don’t get discouraged by the first paragraph of this John Tierney editorial. When I read the sentence, “suppose Mark and Bill live in a deterministic universe,” I thought I had accidentally clicked on David Brooks and was about to read 750 words about how Mark is a hardworking small business owner, Bill is an Ivy-League professor, and their opinions about NASCAR are going to decide the 2012 election. Fortunately, though, Tierney is not a smug panderer out to steal your last McNugget. Instead, he has written a thoughtful column about the problem of free will that links to actual scientific studies, including this one suggesting that belief in free will correlates with hard work. Tierney concludes that, “The more that researchers investigate free will, the more good reasons there are to believe in it.” This argument is totally unconvincing, of course. You can’t choose to believe in free will just because it might make you more successful, in the same way you can’t choose to believe you’re stunningly attractive just because it will make you more confident on dates. And like that, we arrive at one of the fundamental problems of free will.

Dennis Kucinich makes everyone sad, again

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government March 22, 2011 5 Comments

Yes. Yes she is.

Like a Keebler elf who knows cookies are really bad for you, Dennis Kucinich (D-OH, net worth $17,000) has once again made his party sad by telling the truth. The former presidential candidate and lifetime buzzkill pointed out yesterday that President Obama had authorized the use of military force in Libya without the approval of Congress and thus violated the constitution. “President Obama moved forward without Congress approving,” Kucinich told Raw Story. “He didn’t have Congressional authorization, he has gone against the Constitution, and that’s got to be said.” He has a point—although it is of course the same point he made about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars under George W. Bush, plus various interventions under Clinton. The President cannot order military attacks without the approval of Congress, except in cases of imminent threat to the United States. Recognizing along with the world community that Muammar Gaddafi is a dickhole is not imminent threat. For that reason, Kucinich said, ordering air strikes against Libya without congressional approval was an impeachable offense. Cue awkward silence throughout Democratic strategy conference call.

Tactics of Argument: TFD

By Dan Brooks in lying March 21, 2011 1 Comment

What the fuck is that thing?

If you’re reading this, Combat! blog has mystically unbroken itself after prosecuting some sort of sympathy strike with AT&T’s cellphone architecture and Japanese reactor coolers for the better part of the day. Form follows function in this case, since today’s post is about both technology and relentless uncooperation. Ben “The Angle” Gabriel sent me this transcript from a trial in Ohio last year, in which Lawrence Patterson—then head of information technology for the recorder’s division of the Cuyahoga County fiscal office—claims not to know what a photocopier is. He obviously does, of course, but he has to be made to admit that before opposing counsel’s argument can move forward. Thus we observe a classic Tactic of Argument colloquially known as TFD.

Friday links! Logical next steps edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links March 18, 2011 2 Comments

This photo of one of several hipster traps to appear recently around New York was sent to me by Big Game, and it clearly represents a new epoch in the nebulous socio-aesthetic construction that is hipsterdom. First of all, I bet I could get that beer out of there without getting my hand caught. Second of all, the best part about irony is that you can even use it on irony. Once you do, your newly ironic approach to your previously sincere experience of irony seems like the only reasonable perspective. It’s the logical next step, even though it is prima facie absurd, and the paradox between these two understandings of the same relation can be resolved by noting that, oh yeah, the thing you did in the first place was absurd, too. This week’s link roundup is full of such progressions, in which logic demands more absurdity from absurdity. It’s the inductive narrative of history, and it’s happening all around us—even to Glenn Beck. When’s somebody going to make a trap with a Bible, an airplane bottle of scotch and a Ho-Ho in it?

Oh whiskey, you’re the devil

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas March 17, 2011 1 Comment

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUs-fqoTx7U

I shan’t insult you by explaining who the Pogues are, but I will observe that A) even they were not immune to early-eighties album art design and B) 27 year-old Shane MacGowan, at right, looks eerily like my brother. Unfortunately for MacGowan—and incredibly fortunately for Brooks—they now look very different. The Irish are not a handsome people, and we do not shepherd what beauty we have into old age. In MacGowan’s case, heroin and excessive drinking—he famously stopped singing during the first song of a 2002 concert at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre to vomit on fans in the front row—conspired with a weird nationalist/intellectual refusal to brush his teeth to make him look like, well, everyone he ever sang about. “I’m completely Irish,” he told the Guardian in 2001, by way of explaining why he had arrived at his interview holding a bottle of gin. This interview took place at a bar.