Combat! - Page 95 of 406 - A blog by Dan Brooks

Political correctness might be back; fretting about it totally is

By Dan Brooks in Epistemology November 10, 2015 3 Comments

Yale students confront professor Nicholas Christakis over an email his wife wrote.

“I’m not politically correct,” says the person who is racially, sexually and anatomically correct. The 1990s’ favorite straw man is back, possibly for real but definitely as something to fret about. For the last several days, Yale has been embroiled in debate over an email professor Erika Christakis wrote suggesting campus administrators not supervise students’ Halloween costumes. Students were outraged, calling for Christakis’s resignation and demanding that Nicholas Christakis, her husband, apologize. “You should not sleep at night,” one student shouted at him. “You’re disgusting.” It is pretty disgusting when a man refuses to apologize for his wife saying kids should get to wear what they want. This seems like another troubling indicator that today’s college students are less interested in free speech and more interested in enforcing a simplistic ethos of identity. But what if they’re not?

Ben Carson’s rap ad makes the wrong kind of sense

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas November 9, 2015 1 Comment

"I got a six-figure check for separating twins / I got a [bleep] this big for putting them in."

“I got a six-figure check for separating twins / I got a [bleep] like that for putting them in.”

By now you have heard of Ben Carson’s rap ad, which is playing on urban radio stations across the southeast and in waiting rooms throughout hell. You can listen to it here, or just wait to hear it bumping from a Buick Lucerne. It’s possible Carson should not have made a rap ad. The circumstances that led him to do so seem fortuitous: self-described “Republican Christian rapper” Aspiring Mogul, aka Robert Donaldson, sent a song to Carson’s campaign manager after seeing the biopic Gifted Hands. The Carson campaign put Asp-Mo’s song on its Facebook page, and from there it was a logical step to collaborating on a rapping campaign spot that goes like this:

Vote and support Ben Carson / for our next president to be awesome. / If we want to get America back on track, / we gotta vote Ben Carson, a matter of fact.

Those are the two couplets by Aspiring Mogul that made it into the one-minute ad; the rest is sound bites—I guess samples—from Carson’s speeches. There is also a flute loop. From a certain perspective, it makes sense that Carson would release a rap ad. But from another, better perspective, it makes no sense at all.

Friday links: It could happen here and be somebody else’s fault edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links November 6, 2015 1 Comment

“I’m a gonna make-a the Italy great again.”

Fascism: nobody know what it is, but it’s probably happening. Bane of the high school history teacher, Fascism is hard to define, probably because we know it when we see it. Specifically, we knew it when we saw Nazis and Italian corporatists start a world war with it. But Mussolini called fascism fascism before he became history’s most humorous monster. Like a nation, fascism is an idea. It stems from events but transcends them. And like a nation, fascism can live as an idea after it occupies no territory. The state is more important than the individual. We need a leader who can get things done, working with corporate power instead of against it, belligerent abroad and supervisory at home. We love this country, and we can take it away from those who don’t. Today is Friday, and I sure am glad that ideolgoy doesn’t describe any political movements now active in America. Won’t you evade responsibility for it happening here with me?

Why Americans don’t trust the media

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates November 5, 2015 0 Comment

Extra extra! Boys sexualized!

As anyone whose words are broadcast will tell you, Americans don’t trust the media. It probably started around Watergate, when we lost faith in institutions after Woodward and Bernstein uncovered corruption that went all the way to the president. We’ve hated reporters ever since. Instead of numbly accepting the mainstream media’s lies as they penetrate our ears and pert mouths, we invest our trust in politicians, for example the brave senator from Texas, Ted Cruz.

That was his answer to a question about the debt ceiling. It’s clear why Americans no longer trust the media, with their gotcha questions about whose tax plan would bankrupt the government and which candidacies are fictional. In your ordinary American life, whom do you trust? You trust your friends. And who are you friends? They’re the people who tell you what you want to hear.

If you apply this rule of thumb, it’s easy to see why Cruz, Ben Carson, and Donald Trump all enjoy such sterling reputations for trustiness. Cruz knows we’re sick of the media talking about what he did. Carson’s going to give us all 25-point tax cuts and balance the budget. And Trump is an inherently genuine person. That’s what people want to hear—not a bunch of media elites grousing about what cannot be done.

You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent, in which I applaud Senator Cruz and his fellow Republicans for finally acknowledging that Americans have lost confidence in their reporters. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.

Pundits rejoice: Rubio surge now supported by evidence, kind of

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates November 4, 2015 3 Comments

Victorian street pundits wait for Mr. Rubio to bring them Christmas.

Victorian street pundits wait for Mr. Rubio to bring them a Christmas.

We can now safely close the voting for Quintessential Headline of the 2016 Election with Slate’s entry, Pundits Have Long Been Saying Rubio Is on the Rise. Now There’s Finally Some Evidence to Back That Up. Both political betting markets and pundits seem to consider Rubio the favorite to win the Republican nomination, which is strange, since he hasn’t polled above 11% since Donald Trump entered the race. But now Rubio has been endorsed by Senator Corey Gardner of Colorado and Senator Steve Daines of Nilbog. He’s also been backed by billionaire Paul Singer, although Singer has not technically given him a bunch of money yet. And it turns out the Gardner/Daines endorsements move Rubio up to fourth place on Five Thirty-Eight’s endorsement tracker, which seems like less than the favorite position. But the Republican phenom for which there was no evidence now enjoys scant evidence. Pundits rejoice! Further deflation after the jump.