Friday links! Bracing discoveries edition

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 1 Comment

You will understand soon enough.

Depending on your attitude toward philosophical idealism, pretty much everything that can be known is out there, waiting to be discovered. Like the word “discovery,” knowledge has little meaning apart from a human subjet to know it, but knowledge as object—the location of your old apartment keys, what went wrong with Amelia Earhart’s plane, the mass of an undiscovered planet—is out there, waiting to be figured. Today is Friday, and the weekend, defined by possibility and inactivity, is upon us. Who knows what the future will reveal? I’m still trying to catch up with the past. Won’t you look back forward with me?

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Killin’ it!

By Dan Brooks in representative democracy 2 Comments

Michelle Obama’s speech was almost exactly twice as good as Mitt Romney’s, at least according to Twitter. It’s possible that points to a difference in the media habits of people who watch the DNC and the RNC, respectively, but I’m going to say it’s because she was twice as good. Lots of people agree with me, even if Charles Krauthammer issued a formal bah, humbug. “And the brilliance of it is this,” he said: “It drained Obama of any, either, ideological motivation, or any having to do with self-interest or ambition, which I think is sort of a more plausible explanation.” You saw through it, Krauthammer: the president is ambitious.

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Friday links! Second best team in Tampa edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 6 Comments

The Republican National Convention has blown out of Tampa with a whoosh of salt air, leaving behind it only litter and fact checkers. By all accounts, it was a fine affair that Combat! blog covered not at all. I don’t go in for political kabuki. I only like political Noh, on which the RNC verged several times. A bunch of crazy stuff happened in Florida this week, and none of it was true. Super PAC and campaign operatives stayed in the same hotel, not coordinating at all. Paul Ryan blamed Obama for a bunch of stuff that happened before he was president, and Clint Eastwood did a ventriloquist act with no dummy. Also, a Montana man was killed while impersonating Bigfoot, in what for now seems to be an unrelated story. At this point, though, I woud believe anything.

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Romney takes it, Santorum surging from behind

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates 5 Comments

Mitt Romney, who does not believe in evolutionary genetics

The face of his sons says it all: Mitt Romney technically won the Iowa caucuses. He got it by eight votes. It was a victory clutched in the snatch of defeat, since the real winner—the guy who worked his black slacks off to accomplish what Romney did casually—was Rick Santorum. Now it’s his turn to be the GOP front-runner who runs second to Mitt Romney. Michele Bachmann has dropped out. Newt Gingrich was eaten by a big, poop-eating snake that thought he was a poop. And Ron Paul believes that you can’t have a caucus, because they’re unconstitutional. He came in third to Santorum, proving that you can always sell nihilism to the Republican Party.

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Friday links! You’re better than that edition [with update!]

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 2 Comments

Christopher Hitchens, young

Christopher Hitchens died yesterday in Houston. Houston seems like the wrong place for that man to finish up, and such a detail, essentially arbitrary, intensifies the sense of decline that naturally accompanies death. Declinism is a hazard. The other night a former philosophy professor advanced to me his theory that Europe had sunk and the United States was being sucked under with it.* He seemed to be getting close to Houston himself, and I considered that declinism is a worldview for an old person. The rest of us have to fake it until we make it. For a young(ish) person, to say that civilization is in decline is to abdicate a very real office. It is to ignore free choices and the responsibility that comes with them, and we’re better than that. Or at least we could be, were we not committed to the notion that we are living in the last two minutes of a basketball game, when we can foul everyone and throw up wild shots with impunity. It’s Friday, the surest way to blow the game is to decide that we’ve lost already, and the voice of conscience cheers loud as ever. Even if it did get esophageal cancer.

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