Friday links! Too much movie make your heart weak edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 0 Comment

UFC lightweight Khabib Nurmagomedov and his hat

I went this whole winter without getting sick but now, in the last month, I find my throat is scratchy and my skin hurts. Obviously, I’m not sick. That would mar my perfect record. And I’m fencing in Bozeman tomorrow, so regardless of the condition of my immune system, I am by definition healthy enough to poke and get poked with car antennas. The trick is to ignore the feedback coming from your body. It’s an illusion, as any religion will tell you. Just don’t think about all the people you know who have died, and all the depictions of people sickened unto death that you have seen in movies. Today is Friday, and too much movie make your heart weak. Won’t you push through with me?

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Friday links! Dream of history edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 0 Comment
Ronald Reagan gets the last word at the brokered GOP convention of 1976.

Ronald Reagan gets the last word at the brokered GOP convention of 1976.

Remember adolescence, when you read 1984, studied the Great Depression and rise of Hitler, and lamented, in your childish way, that history basically stopped after your parents were adolescents? Remember wishing history would happen right now? Here you go, asshole. The middle class is evacuating, an ineffective political class serves the rich at the expense of its own popularity, and a charismatic maniac is rising to power on a platform of militant ethnic nationalism. Today is Friday, and events are starting to eerily resemble those dark days before the Republican National Convention of 1976. Won’t you thank goodness there’s no other parallel with me?

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Why isn’t Julian Assange a better person?

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 1 Comment

For those of us who remain committed, on an ideological if not a practical level, to the notion that the truth can never be immoral, Julian Assange is an increasingly troubling person. When Assange first released his cache of US diplomatic cables to various news outlets, Combat! blog took the position that Wikileaks is awesome. It got us into a lot of spirited discussions—viz. “Is That Journalism?” at Flippers and the extremely treacherous “Is That Rape?” at Mom’s kitchen table—that emphasized the enormous gap between theoretical and actual applications of the Truth. The Truth exists as a sort of disembodied ideal in our heads, but it goes out into the world in the company of people and events. As this excellent narrative of the people and events surrounding the Wikileaks disclosures suggests,* the Truth is frustratingly inseparable from the person telling it. The more we learn about Julian Assange’s truth-telling, the more his project seems to be about the telling rather than the truth. That’s a shame, since it seems to be what the powers that Assange set out to embarrass wanted in the first place.

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