Friday links! Directionless assemblage of events edition

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 5 Comments

Oh, to be young in Warra Wanna

It’s Friday, and that means it’s time to fit the irregular detritus of the week into a taught chain of causal, um, links. The problem with contemporary life—if I can just jump right into it here—is that it’s increasingly non-narrative. Ever since the basic unit of work went from stalking a mastodon over the frozen plains for two weeks to franking insurance forms in a cubicle for eight hours, human life has become more and more episodic. That’s great for creating a mood but bad for developing character, to put it in workshop terms. Maybe that’s why the character of our nation has been so moody lately, with alternating factions declaring crisis amid recovery, victory in stalemate, strategem in disaster and vice versa, pretty much anew every morning. There must be a narrative in there somewhere, since yesterday will definitely not be happening again today, but sometimes the story seems hard to follow. Maybe we’re just looking at another week’s episode in the long-running melodrama of stupidity versus sense. Maybe stupidity has won, and the rest of the performance will be a puppet show, with shrieking socks debating each other in the same idiot’s voice. The fact of the matter is that not everything happens according to some plan, and our best evidence for destiny is still assembled in retrospect. This week, retrospect reveals only a startling refusal to cohere. As you move from the structure of your workweek to the short-form improvisations of the weekend, consider Camus’s assertion that meaning is only something we make for ourselves, and therefore so is meaninglessness. It is the edge between our desperate understandings and an indifferent universe where stories are made, and it’s the friction in the joint that gives them heat. It’s a cold morning in the Combat! blog offices, so let’s get a little fire going, huh?

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Meghan McCain ideologically pure, ready to be thrown into volcano

By Dan Brooks in Meghan McCain 4 Comments

The four secrets to Meghan McCain's success

Remember yesterday, when we mentioned the ideological purity test that has become so popular among Republicans? Of course you don’t. Just because you’ve forgotten doesn’t mean that it ceased to exist, though, or that it didn’t recently vindicate perennial victim  Meghan McCain. The latest entity to unjustly persecute Me-Mac—after Michelle Malkin, Karl Rove’s Twitter account, and her own boobs—are the George Washington University College Republicans, who recently pulled their sponsorship of her upcoming campus speaking engagement. According to McCain, it’s because her support for marriage equality violates one of the tenets of Republican purity, although it might also be because she’s an idiot. The GW College Republicans can all go sit in their Audis and eat dicks now, though, because Meghan McCain took the purity test, and she totally passed! First of all, if you want to talk ideology with Meghan McCain, it’s best to present it in a form that she already understands from Facebook. Second of all, despite being proud of her ideological purity, Me-Mac is sick of all the labels. Her planned speech at GW promises to induce confused grimaces right from the title, which is “Redefining Republican: No Labels, No Boxes, No Stereotypes.” See, Meghan McCain thinks beyond words like [actual words not supplied] when she thinks about what words like “conservative” and “Republican” mean. As she points out, that puts her in a hunted minority, since “apparently some student organizations feel more comfortable being able to group all Republicans into one place.” You know, like a political party.

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My god, I hope this isn’t real

By Dan Brooks in conservatism 8 Comments

It's time to wrest polits away from the politians and return it to the American people, 16% of whom appear to be utter morons.

While I was languishing in the airport yesterday, beacon of vigilance Ben Fowlkes sent me the most recent Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll of registered Republicans. It is disturbing. It starts off okay, with a healthy number of respondents expressing their intention to vote in the 2010 congressional election and their reluctance to settle on a candidate for president in 2012. It’s disappointing to see Sarah Palin in the lead—and terrifying to see Dick Cheney in third—but three years ahead of the actual election, name recognition is pretty much all there is. Things start to get a little crazy with question three, in which 39% of Republicans opine that President Obama should be impeached. Exactly what crime he has committed goes unspecified, but perhaps respondents were rushing to get to the next question, in which nearly two-thirds of those polled agree that the president is a socialist. Thus begins a series of money shots, in a barrage of insanity that leaves the reader crouched numbly on the floor like a Japanese girl on the internet. If this poll is to be believed, 73% of Republicans think homosexuals shouldn’t be allowed to be schoolteachers. Seventy-seven percent want the Biblical account of creation from Genesis to be taught in public schools. Thirty-one percent want to outlaw contraception. And fully 23% of Republicans believe that their state should secede from the United States of America.

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The sarc mark is a terrible idea [absence of sarc mark]

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized, widespread dumbening 6 Comments

The sarc mark, which indicates sarcasm and itself contains the registered trademark mark. This picture will irreparably damage your eyes.

The good people at the Michigan-based company Sarcasm, Inc. have invented something called the “sarc mark,” a punctuation mark that indicates sarcasm in written correspondence. For only $1.99, you can download the sarc mark and use it in your emails, text messages and Facebook status updates, so that people will finally stop thinking you’re so glad your flight got delayed. The problem of conveying irony in text can be especially vexing, as anyone whose girlfriend has an attachment disorder will attest. We have a tendency, when we are hastily tapping out half-funny text messages at red lights, to simply transcribe what we would say in speech, and our sarcastic speech is augmented by tone of voice, rolling eyes, the jerkoff motion and other flourishes that keyboards don’t have. That being said, a punctuation mark that indicates sarcasm is an awful idea. At best, it will point out at the end of each sentence what dicks we all are. At worst, it will gradually destroy our ability to think. Normally I’m happy to pay $1.99 for that service (episode of Jersey Shore on iTunes) but dammit, some things are sacred, and the western tradition of written irony is one of them.

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