Feds to consider maybe not giving tanks to cops

By Dan Brooks in Fascism 2 Comments
Local police serve the people of Ferguson, Missouri.

Local police serve and protect residents of Ferguson, Missouri.

Perhaps the most jarring element in the lede to this Times story about the militarization of local police departments is the appearance of “silencers” on the list of equipment the federal government gives to police. Obviously, cops need silencers so they can fire their guns without people knowing about it. They need body armor so that combat in the streets poses little threat to them, automatic rifles so they can spray a bunch of bullets in a short period of time, and mine-resistant trucks so they can make music videos. And we need something to do with surplus military equipment since 9/11.

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Citing potential reduction in liberties, Friedman defends infringement on liberties

By Dan Brooks in War on Terror 2 Comments
A baffling chart, courtesy of peacemaker.net

A baffling chart, courtesy of peacemaker.net

Over at the Times, Thomas Friedman has invoked his own slippery slope to argue that if we don’t allow the NSA to log our calls and finger our metadata, another 9/11 might encourage us to cede our civil liberties even worse. It is a pretty convoluted slope—call it the slippery water slide. Friedman’s essential claim is that, while this recently-revealed infringement on our privacy is bad, it does not have so significant an impact on our civil liberties as the theoretical laws a frightened populace might accept in the aftermath of another theoretical 9/11. Then we’d really be in trouble.

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On calling certain other people liars

By Dan Brooks in lying 1 Comment

Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!

If the internet has reduced your brain to a stimulus/response meme generator, the most exciting part of Tuesday night’s debate was Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women” remark. It was weird! He kind of misspoke! Let’s put it on that “walk into Mordor” thing! For my money, however, the strangest moment in the presidential debate was when moderator Candy Crowley corrected Romney regarding Obama’s use of the word “terror” after the attack on the US consulate in Libya. He did say that in the Rose Garden the day after the attack. What Romney claimed was not factually accurate, or strictly correct or, you know, true. But was he lying?

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Friday links! Same planet, different worlds edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 1 Comment

Once again, Joy Behar cuts right to the essence of the story.

So yeah—Oral Roberts has a gay grandson, and his name is Randy. An ordinary person might find humor in the names Randy and Oral, just as he might predict that at least one lineal descendent of television’s most virulent homophobe would be gay. But Oral Roberts is not a normal person, and the whole thing blew his mind. One forgets that although we are all on the same planet, we live in emphatically different worlds. It’s Friday, and one person’s foundational assumption is another’s stunning discovery. This week’s link roundup is about the difference between how we live—and, by extension, how we assume others live—and how they actually do. I think you will find it touching and disturbing in turn.

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Who is S.E. Cupp, exactly?

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse, Uncategorized 5 Comments

"Are you sure we should take the picture right now? It seems kind of windy."

In addition to being every woman I told myself I should just go over and talk to, SE Cupp is also a mystery. She’s a professed atheist who has written a book called Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media’s Attack on Christianity. She’s just completed a master’s degree in religious studies at Columbia, and also just asserted her nonbelief on Bill Maher fifty times. [Warning: Maher at his most irritating.] She did the same thing with Sean Hannity, who insisted that she was actually an agnostic.* In an interview with the Daily Beast, she told Benyamin Cohen that ““I knew at a very young age that I didn’t really buy the whole God gamut.” She also told him that as a child she wanted to be a nun. Her columns for the NY Daily News—in which she argues that President Obama has not effectively wielded the power of fear and that we shouldn’t clean up the BP oil spill—suggest that she might simply be a contrarian. Yet she has built her career on aggressively upholding traditional beliefs. Let us not forget, when she argues that the news media naturally attack Christianity because “liberalism and secularism are the standards and anything that crops up against that are the exceptions,” that she is talking about a religion professed by nearly 80% of Americans.

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