Friday links! Unchecked misanthropy edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links, Uncategorized 14 Comments

In a contemporary weltanschauung that has pretty much abandoned temptation narratives, misanthropy still exercises an evil allure. You must resist. Misanthropy is a sin in the classic sense, in that it feels really good now but will make you feel bad later, and in the long run it will wreck your life. You cannot succumb to it, lest you start treating new people as crises instead of opportunities. Yet evidence for misanthropy’s central proposition is all around—I would say the United States contains about 300 million supporting arguments—and the internet documents it for us in lurid detail. It’s Friday, Missoula has gone from dazzling sun to 40-degree rain, and the temptation to regard everyone as crappy runs high. Like Christ on the temple roof, we must refuse. But also like C on the T-R, we are allowed to get really close. Won’t you maybe indulge just a little with me?

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Airline boarding times have doubled since 1970

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 4 Comments

Like a lot of basically happy people, I believe the general public is getting stupider over time. It’s not a novel idea. In the Odes, Horace complains that “our fathers, viler than our grandfathers, begot us who are even viler, and we bring forth a progeny more degenerate still.” That was in like 12 BC, and we can only imagine how he would have felt had he lived to see everyone adopt Christianity a couple generations later. The future always looks weird and scary. Since the present is basically a broke-ass version of the future, it follows that it should appear gross and dumb. Or maybe—and I’m just spitballing here—the people alive now really are exceptionally lazy and stupid. The very notion of human progress implies the possibility of regress, so some iterations of society must be more inept than others, right? If only there were some way to measure it. Incidentally, airline boarding times have doubled since 1970.

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The unpopular position: Your kid is a public nuisance

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 16 Comments
A bunch of assholes

A bunch of assholes

I’m 32 years old, which means I’ve reached the age where many of my friends have either had children or admitted they have a cocaine problem. Of the two groups, both keep going to restaurants, but only one conducts its business with anything resembling discretion. This country has a child problem. It’s not the children themselves, who after all will ensure the continued existence of human civilization if we can avoid a nuclear war, and serve as a source of high-protein food if we can’t. It’s the parents. Like the lifelong smoker who thinks his jacket smells fine, they’ve spent so much time with their children that they regard the presence of a shrieking, silverware-drumming homunculus as the default human condition. It’s not. The default human condition is loneliness, as any 32 year-old man who works out of the one-bedroom apartment where he lives with his stereo can tell you. As such a man, I regard the presence of children in restaurants, coffee shops and airplanes not as some sort of force majeure, but as a force vous douchebags, and I believe you should take responsibility for it.

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