Why won’t Rumsfeld admit he is bullshit?

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 1 Comment
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld describes a fish that there is no evidence he did not catch.

Defense Donald Rumsfeld describes a fish that there is no evidence he did not catch.

Donald Rumsfeld is closely associated with two memorable quotations. The first came during his evasion of a question about how (subtext: if) he knew that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, when he said “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or vice versa.” It was an infuriating statement, partly because the vice-versa version is dumb but mostly because Carl Sagan used to say it about the existence of extraterrestrial life somewhere in the vast universe, not about a specific place where we had sent UN weapons inspectors. The second classic Rumsfeld quote is the infamous “known knowns” disquisition, in which Rumsfeld responds to a question partly by attacking the very concept of knowledge. It provided the title for Errol Morris’s new documentary The Unknown Known, which he will be very happy to discuss with your news outlet.

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Friday links! Triumph of theory edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 3 Comments
The cat fits in the box.

Japanese cat celebrity Maru fits in the box.

To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, some people see things as they are and ask why; others see things as they never were and ask why the media is lying. The world of theory is invariably preferable to the world of, you know, the world. We derive our broad principles from the specific around us, but explicit language feels more concrete and understandable—more true—than the details. So after we extrapolate our theories and take them to heart, we return to the real and identify the places where it doesn’t match theory as flaws. Today is Friday, or at least it should be, and anyone who tells me otherwise has screwed up the progression of days. Won’t you demand that the flesh be made word with me?

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Richard Sherman: “thug” is acceptable n-word

By Dan Brooks in Here Is Your American Culture 5 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPD_Lgq7IyI

By now you have probably seen Richard Sherman’s postgame interview, shot seconds after he tipped an end zone pass to his teammate and won the NFC championship for the Seattle Seahawks. Due to my jet-setter lifestyle, I heard about this video for days before I actually saw it, and the real thing was kind of anticlimactic. Sherman has a rad voice—presumably from yelling on football fields for ten years straight—and he criticizes Michael Crabtree, whom he is rumored to dislike. Mostly, he declares himself the best cornerback in the game. It’s kind of unseemly and kind of awesome, as human beings in celebration are. It also led a bunch of commenters to call him a thug. On Thursday, Sherman opined that “thug” is an acceptable way of calling a black man the n-word.

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The forgotten face of class warfare

By Dan Brooks in Class Warfare 3 Comments

Rep. John Fleming (R-LA) and his hair. Photo by Gage Skidmore

In troubled times, it’s easy for an angry majority to trample the rights of a disenfranchised minority. Here’s how troubled our times are: we’re even trying to trample heavily franchised minorities, such as Rep. John Fleming of Louisiana, who owns a bunch of UPS and Subway stores that made him $6.3 million in 2010. Yesterday morning, Fleming assured MSNBC that $6 million a year isn’t that much, since after he pays his 500 employees, forks over the rent for his locations and otherwise sees to his overhead, “my net income—the amount that I have to reinvest in my business and feed my family—is more like $600,000 of that $6.3 million. And so by the time I feed my family I have maybe $400,000 left over.” Don’t hang up, but we’re going to do some math after the jump.

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Friday links! Sugaring the pill edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 0 Comment

As the chick who does it with Dracula in Dracula once said,* sometimes you have to take the good with the bad. Today is Friday, and that’s good. The American economy collapsed like two years ago and now the only people with jobs are professional assholes arguing about whom to blame for said economy and each other, plus terrorism, and that’s bad. It’s a continuum, see, and we’re all just swept up in it, bobbing up and down like boats, albeit not both up and down simultaneously as would better fit my point. Maybe let’s go back to the pill metaphor. For this week’s link roundup, we have some important stuff that’s so horribly depressing I can barely stand to think about it. We also have Kanye and a fail video, by way of sugar. Won’t you have a swallow with me?

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