Dave Defends Raping Boys

That's more or less the argument Brooks makes in today's column on the Penn State boy rape. He trots out the old "You don't know what you would do until you're in that situation" chestnut, then cites the usual suspects: genocide, Kitty Genovese.

 

Not Even Close

Yeah. Right. Except there's really not much of a comparison between the Kitty Genovese or Rwandan genocide cases and stumbling on the football coach butt fucking a little boy in the locker room shower. There are scenarios when it's legitimate to say you can't know what you would do until you're in that situation. But this isn't one of them. All the witness had to do was to call out, "Hey! Stop raping that boy!"

Both Sides Now

Once again, Dave argues both sides to make no meaningful point. He spends the bulk of the column citing wishy-washy social science that defends moral relativism -- we see what we want to see, blah blah blah -- but then concludes by implying it's our wishy-washing, moral relativism that allows us to let grownups rape boys in locker rooms. Just more of Brooks's bottomless intellectual dishonesty.

What's your next column? Defending the Catholic Church's right to rape boys?

Oy ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/opinion/the-inequality-map.html

So if church inequality, ancestor inequality, moral fitness inequality and spending inequality are unacceptable, we can look forward to Brooks’s next column announcing that he’s leaving the Republican Party.

Vey

Foreign visitors often come up to me and ask, “Why does David Brooks get a column in the New York Times?" And I answer, "Damned if I know. Nice cupcakes!"

Wrong Again

Today, DB complains about "Blue Inequality."

There is so much that's wrong with Brooks's analysis, but let's stick to just two points. First, the complaint about 1% vs. 99% is not exclusively about income inequality; that's a literal and tendentious interpretation. The complaint comprises educational inequality as well as income inequality, in part because college is becoming financially out of reach for all but the most affluent, which of course further entrenches the divide.

There is almost no relation between the general economy and the economics of higher education. In that sense, higher education is similar to health care: the costs exist in their own spheres.

Ain't Data Great?

Brooks is so enamored of social science statistics and research. There's plenty of data about students graduating college saddled with crushing debt, and that Congress refuses to address the problem. Why does the federal government charge 7% on student loans?

That's the second point: Brooks is absolutely correct to underscore the links between education and educational attainment on the one hand, and individual, community and national social and economic well-being on the other (e.g., income, health, family dynamics, social cohesion).

So what's Brooks's solution? Complain about young, White, urban liberals.

Really?

It's liberals and progressives who have been drawing attention to the social consequences of educational disparities at least since before Brown v. Board of Education. There’s plenty of social science and developmental research on how critical early childhood support is to academic success and lifelong well-being. Go read some. Fool!

If Brooks and other conservatives believe education is so critical to social well-being, as liberals have been screaming about for generations, why don’t they support, say, early childhood learning instead of gutting public education and diverting tax dollars to religious schools?

Brooks’s intellectual dishonesty is breathtaking.

Obscure References to Others' Thoughts and Work

The economists Jon Bakija, Adam Cole and Bradley Heim

Meaningless Data

• Roughly 31 percent
• About 16 percent
• 14 percent
• 8 percent
• 5 percent
• About 2 percent
• 38 percent
• 75 percent
• tens of millions of Americans
• 40 percent
• 50 percent

Oh No You Didn't

Did Brooks really tag the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations as anti-Semitic in today's column?

I think he did!

"Take the Occupy Wall Street movement. This uprising was sparked by the magazine Adbusters, previously best known for the 2004 essay, Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish? — an investigative report that identified some of the most influential Jews in America and their nefarious grip on policy."

What a putz.

Don't Let the Facts Get in the Way of an Ignorant Argument

Brooks laments what he declares to be the lack of innovation in America today, variously the "innovation slowdown" and "innovation stagnation."

Well, Dave, it certainly doesn’t help that our political leaders don’t believe in science, anthropology or climate change; that they put more faith in faith than in ideas; and that they block public investment in science, research and things like, oh, alternative energy. Like the Green Economy Brooks slammed a couple of weeks ago for not having created 300 million new jobs in two years.

Best Unsupported, Ideological Swipe

“... the environmentalist ethos has undermined the faith in gee-whiz technological wizardry.” So it’s all the fault of environmentalism?

Gratuitous References to Obscure Writers

• Michael Mandel

• Tyler Cowen

• Neal Stephenson

• Peter Thiel

Unnecessary Reference to Overused Thinker

• Einstein

Boy, Gomer! That Brooks feller sure is smart!

It's Official

It’s impossible to take David Brooks seriously. It seems as if he’s not even trying to be intellectually honest. Here, he blames the imminent collapse of the U.S. economy on:

• consumers
• the credit crunch
• housing prices
• the freeze in business investment
• skills mismatch
• regulatory burdens
• the business class’s utter lack of confidence in the White House
• the looming explosion of entitlement costs
• the public’s lack of confidence in institutions across the board

And of Course ...

Obama’s failure to seize that seminal moment in history, the Simpson-Bowles report.

But not a word about the banks, insurance companies and financial institutions that hollowed out the economy in order to enrich themselves.

No Countrywide, no Goldman Sachs, no AIG, no Bank of America. Don’t they at least get a mention alongside regulatory burdens and business executives’ lack of confidence in Obama? No GOP obstructionism?

Oh, if only we had seized Simpson-Bowles! And fully funded the McKinney Act! If only those greedy old pensioners would stop insisting on getting a return on their Social Security and Medicare payments, and if the poor would just shut up, go to college and get jobs, we’d be great again!

Hell No, You Won't!

As for politicians’ sclerotic thinking about public policy, Obama has proposed investment on a green economy and at least offered the public option as a way to restructure the health insurance market. What bold approaches have Republicans offered other than lockstep opposition to the colored guy in the White House and support for tax cuts for the rich?

Dave's Best Joke

Simplify the tax code. End corporate taxes and create a consumption tax. Reshape the European Union to make it either more unified or less (?!) Reduce the barriers to business formation. Reform Medicare so it is fiscally sustainable. Break up the banks and increase capital requirements. Lighten debt burdens even if it means hitting the institutional creditors.

Dave, the Republicans won’t even keep the FAA afloat for a week without turning it into a crisis. You really think they’ll go along with breaking up the banks and “hitting” institutional creditors?

Down With the EU!

Of course, your suggestion for reforming the EU, we're all with you on that one. Just as soon as we figure out what you're talking about.

There He Goes Again

"[A]t least Republicans respect Americans enough to tell us what they really think."

That's not worth dignifying with an insult. But I'll try.

Republicans say that the deficit and debt are existential threats. But if they honestly believed that, they'd support SOME tax increases if only to save the country from ruin. What they really believe is that the social safety net -- Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid -- should be dismantled and capitalism left to work its magic unregulated, and the rabble left unprotected.

Bush and Reagan ran up the debt and deficit to create a crisis -- starve the beast, they called it -- so they could dismantle the New Deal. Grover Norquist and his GOP marionettes want to "strangle government in the bathtub," or some weird construction like that.

You Lie!

But no, David, they won't tell us that. Because they don't respect us enough, and because they know they'll be pilloried at the polls.

David, you're still struggling with intellectual honesty. Try harder.

Straw Dog

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/opinion/brooks-the-planning-fallacy.html

Brooks writes: "Over the past decades, Americans have developed an absurd view of the power of government. Many voters seem to think that government has the power to protect them from the consequences of their sins. Then they get angry and cynical when it turns out that it can’t."

Says Who?

Oldest trick in the book: Set up a straw dog, and tear it down. What evidence does he have that ANYONE feels the government should solve all their problems?

The problem is just the opposite: Over the decades, the government, a powerful referee when it wants to be, has withdrawn from the arena and let the powerful interests run amok. That's how we got this latest financial crisis, by eliminating regulations, distinctions and protections. That's not creating free markets; that's picking winners and losers.

Loser!

Ultimately, the loser is capitalism, because when the government withdraws as the ref, powerful interests combine and distort the market, and consumers get run over.

The whole argument over lots of government vs. minimal government -- Rick Perry's notion of making the FEDERAL government "inconsequential" in people's lives (never the state gov, of course) -- isn't about left or right or free markets or socialism. It's about protecting capitalism in the long term by softening its roughest edges.

Thrown Under the Wheel

Capitalism has always been recognized as a rough system; it's great if you're among its winners, but it's brutal on the losers, and there will always be losers. No one wants go get rid of it; we just want to make sure that someone is there to help those who would otherwise get crushed under its wheels.

That's what will protect capitalism in the long run by ensuring people don't turn against it.

Brooks, you fool!

The Hoax of Climate Change?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/opinion/brooks-where-the-jobs-arent.html?ref=davidbrooks

Whoever said the point of a Green economy was to create full employment? It's to ensure that there's enough energy to sustain human habitation and industry after the fossil fuel runs out.

Have Faith

The same people who believe climate change is a hoax because there's no 100 percent, definitive, scientific proof don't believe in science. But they do believe in the omnipotence of an unseen force somewhere in the heavens for which there is not a shred of empirical evidence, let alone proof.

We're Doomed

And Obama is an enabler of our destruction by not standing in the way.

Nice Boy, Long Way From Home

Sometimes it’s so hard to know where to begin responding to a David Brooks column. This one's a Dusey.

Whose morality is he extolling? Is Brooks suggesting that young people look to those community oriented paragons of ethics and morality who favor torture, unprovoked war; manipulation of public opinion; aggrandizement of the wealthy; elimination of the social safety net; vilification of racial and religious minorities, the poor and the politically and economically powerless; the apotheosis of guns over public safety; and the exploitation of homeowners?

Role Models?

Whom should those young people emulate? Grover Norquist? Eric Cantor? Jamie Dimon? Newt Gingrich? If so, kudos to those immoral, empty young people for choosing a different path.

If Brooks had any sense of intellectual honesty or political courage, he’d apply his analysis to the grownups who ran this country into the ground, and who are itching for another crack at it.

As for rabid consumerism, puh-leeze. That’s the backbone of this economy. Where’ve you been? The problem we’re having is that people aren’t spending enough on stuff. After 9/11, Bush told us to go shop. I don't recall hearing any acceptance of personal accountability by anyone in the Bush administration for all their failures and missteps.

But 18 year olds are held to a higher standard? Hoo-kay, then.

He a Smart Feller!

This is a classic Brooks column in another respect: its pretentious catalog of references to (mostly) obscure academics and researchers. I counted nine:

• Christian Smith
• Kari Christoffersen
• Hilary Davidson
• Patricia Snell Herzog
• Allan Bloom
• Gertrude Himmelfarb
• Alasdair MacIntyre
• Charles Taylor
• James Davison Hunter

Nine citations? In a 15-paragraph column? OK, we get it: You read a lot. You're smart. You like abstruse stuff. You're recondite. But all these citations constitute the mark of a writer who develops his material by reading others’ stuff instead of doing his own living and reporting. It reads like a college term paper.

Nice Boy, Long Way From Home

David, you’re probably a very nice person. But you’re wildly out of touch and in over your head as a social thinker.

What's His Point?


What's the subtext in Dave's column dismissing Green industry as unable to unilaterally create full employment (Sept. 6, 2011 column)? That climate change is a hoax? Or that the science, as Rick Perry says, is "not settled"? Pardon me, but since when is 100 percent certainty the criterion for public policy?


We weren't 100 percent certain that ...

• Saddam had WMD, but we went to war anyway

• the Bush tax cuts would destroy the budget, but Congress enacted them anyway

• a nuclear arsenal would deter the Soviets (we still don't know that they did, but we can probably say that we don't know that they didn't)

• repealing regulations on business will lead to 20 percent GDP growth, 106 percent employment, and the Second Coming of Christ, but there's a lot of agitation for it

• Rick Perry would make a really lousy president, but he's running anyway
• there's an ominipotent, omniscient, ageless, timeless, unseen, bearded being in the sky, but lots of people believe it anyway, despite there being ZERO evidence for it

You see?

We do lots of things that we're not sure -- absolutely, positively sure -- will work. But we do 'em anyway. Like voting. And what a waste of time that's turned out to be.

What if there is global warming?

We'll only know for sure by the time it's too late to do anything about it.

Hitting the Trifecta

In today's column, Dave dissects and dismisses the federal government's support for Green industries by saying it's failed to create jobs in the short term, so let's just all give up and commit suicide. He writes:

"The U.S. Conference of Mayors estimated in April 2009 that green jobs could account for 10 percent of new job growth over the next 30 years. Alas, it was not to be. The gigantic public investments in green energy may be stimulating innovation and helping the environment. But they are not evidence that the government knows how to create private-sector jobs." Our emphasis.

Awful Argumentation

Last time I checked, 30 years from 2009 would be 2039, not 2011. That's speeding up the timetable just a bit.

Intellectual Dishonesty

Notwithstanding that closely watched bellewether of public policy the U.S. Conference of Mayors, who ever said that the purpose of green industries was to create jobs in the short-term? Or to create jobs at all?

The purposes of green industry are to ensure there's energy after the fossil fuel runs out; to ensure the environment is at least moderately habitable for human existence and activity; and to keep up with the Chineses, who apparently are outdoing us in this sector.

Obscure References

"In 2009, Josh Lerner of Harvard Business School published a useful book called 'Boulevard of Broken Dreams.' He found that for each instance in which the government has successfully promoted entrepreneurial activity, there is a pile of instances in which it failed."

Yes, we've all read Lerner's tendentious analysis, but what about Kadiddlhoffer's counterargument? What? You haven't read Kadiddlehoffer? And you call yourself informed? Fool.

David Brooks's Struggle With Political Ambiguity

Don't Let the Door Knock Your Ass on the Way Out

From Dave's Aug. 30, 2011, column: "Recently I did a little reporting from Kenya and Tanzania before taking a safari with my family. We stayed in--"

Thank you. Next!

You gotta be kidding with this one.

Not So Communal After All

Dave reminisces about the easy "warmth, domesticity and unpretentious conviviality" of orthodox Lubavitchers. The irony here is delish: He finds conviviality among a weird, narrow religious sect that segregates itself from the rest of the community, and that even segregates itself from itself by gender.

Is Brooks a Closeted Liberal?

That's been obvious for years. He's always pulling his punches on Republican intransigence, but he never really extols the hard conservative line. And he sure ain't no Tea Bagger.

You get the sense from his columns that he's your basic vanilla moderate. That's why NPR loves him for the house Conservative. He's harmless. Not like those wild-eyed wingnuts Bachmann, Limbaugh, Beck and the Pauls.

Today's column, on the family's African safari, is a good example of DB's struggle with his political ambiguity. He's promoting communitarianism and the mixing of the classes, two very unconservative notions. "Often, as we spend more on something, what we gain in privacy and elegance we lose in spontaneous sociability." Better, he says, to stay at Comfort Inn than at the Four Seasons.

Leaving aside the ferchachta notion that anyone with more than $50 in his wallet would stay at a Comfort Inn, the point here is that he's a nice, harmless mensch. Can't he come out and tell his family about it? If they love him, they'll accept him the way he is. If they don't, fuck 'em.

Obscure References

"[T]he prominent scholars Elizabeth W. Dunn, Daniel T. Gilbert and Timothy D. Wilson."

Right. We've all read their landmark research on happiness.

Oy vey.
 

Who Is Ross Douthat?

That'll take some time to figure out. But I tell you what, he's getting dangerously close to getting a blog with assertions like this one from today's column:

"Which bring us back to that 10-election winning streak. Maybe God really is on Rick Perry’s side."

And?

I don't get it. Why highlight the Leakeys, whom Brooks acknowledges have been exhaustively profiled, as templates for the examining, questioning life?

It's cool that they can fix their car engine with cow parts. But most of us would go to Pep Boys or Meinecke.

Learning Is Dangerous

Why not focus on more ordinary people who manage to read, debate, question, teach and learn while doing all those mundane, quotidian things like go to a job every day and raise kids? Maybe juxtapose the Leakey way of living against Brooks's Republican compatriots, who view learning and knowledge as threats and questioning as irreligious.

Now that would be relevant.

Name-Drop Quotient

High. Might as well call it "Hey, Everybody! I'm chums with Philip Leakey!

High Chutzpah, Texas Style

Given what his stand-ins have been producing, we're about ready to beg forgiveness and for DB's return. In the meantime, some thoughts about Rick Perry.

The Mystery of the Trinity

Three of the many mysteries that is (are?) Rick Perry:

• Why would a secessionist want to be president of the United States?
• Speaking of pissing on the Constitution, it takes high chutzpah for a secessionist to accuse anyone of treason. Is Ben Bernanke really a traitor? He's a banker, for chrissake. Although that beard does look curiously muttonchoppy. Hmm. ...
• Why does someone so proud of his job-creating record think that government has no role in the economy?

Bottom Line

Guy's a freak. Next!

7 Words You'll Never Utter or Hear

Did you read Diane Ackerman's column today?

We're Ready to Apologize

We notice that Dave is still "on vacation." Sounds to us like he's still stung at having been called out over his paean to Congress.

However, in light of his guest columnist's trenchant piece on the turtles at JFK, we're almost ready to apologize and plead for DB's return.

Almost.

But not quite. He's still a fool. Besides, we love animals. Those turtles are CUTE!

Postscript

We're still wondering who Ross Douthat is. Please post your guesses here.

Oh, Sure

So on Tuesday, we slam D.B. for his misguided column expressing relief that the adults in Congress finally have taken control over the debt ceiling debate. And on Friday, he's ... on vacation. No column. We slam him, he leaves town. Cause and effect? We think so.

Maybe on Planet Zuktar 7 to the 4th Power

Dave's headline today is "Congress in the Lead." The column is about the debt ceiling. And how Congress is in the lead, as in getting the job done. As in not futzing around, dragging its feet, being overly partisan, or kicking the can down the road. (That poor can, by the way. Everybody and his mother's been kicking it down the road. You just know it's going to get thrown under the bus one of these days.)

As Dave says, "... there has been an outbreak of sanity since Congress took control."

Thus we say, maybe on Planet Zuktar 7 to the 4th, but certainly not here on earth. Has Dave not been paying attention? We ALL hate Congress. Congress hates Congress. Why? Because it's ... refusing to lead.

Postscript

"Vote on Boehner Plan Delayed Amid Opposition" (NYT, 7.27.11, page 1)

Oh! So That's Professional Behavior!

Dave takes Obama to task for lecturing and belittling Congress, whereas it's really Congress who's the adult in the room (that adult in the room is getting quite the workout lately. You just know it's going to get thrown under the bus with that can one of these days). Dave writes:

"John Boehner and Harry Reid will continue to verbally abuse each other. But there’s a script to their taunts. Nobody’s feelings are hurt. The old pros are perfectly capable of exchanging clichéd volleys in the morning and then going off and negotiating with each other in the afternoon."

Earth to Zuktar 7 to the 4th: That's exactly what we hate!

'None of Us Is As Dumb As All of Us'*

Did Dave really endorse the idea of delegating this basic function of Congress to a committee? I think he did: "... with much of the heavy lifting done by a bipartisan select committee." Oh, my bad. Not just a "committee," but a "select committee." Oooh!

You see why we say David Brooks is a fool?

*From Demotivators, Despair, Inc.

In Sum

Lots of Awful Argumentation today.

Just a Sliver, Really

"Sometime early last week, a large slice of educated America decided that Amy Chua is a menace to society. Chua, as you probably know, is the Yale professor who has written a bracing critique of what she considers the weak, cuddling American parenting style."

Need We Say More?

Oh, Boy

For self-parody, Dave exceeds himself today. And he does it in the very first paragraph:

"Sometime early last week, a large slice of educated America decided that Amy Chua is a menace to society. Chua, as you probably know, is the Yale professor who has written a bracing critique of what she considers the weak, cuddling American parenting style."

What the --!

Now, empircally speaking, how would he know that a slice, of whatever size, decided anything about Amy Chua? My guess, which is supported by as much evidence as Dave's assertion, is that the far larger portion of educated America has no idea who Amy Chua is. In that context, it's bracing indeed that Dave writes "as you probably know."

At best, lots of people saw a story somewhere about "Tiger mothers," and maybe read enough to conclude that any parent who likes this woman must be a whack and a half.

Brooks a Commie?

Dave displays his lack of intellectual consistency when he writes:

"Researchers ... have found that groups have a high collective intelligence when members of a group ... take turns speaking, when the inputs from each member are managed fluidly, when they detect each others’ inclinations and strengths. Participating in a well-functioning group is really hard."

That's curiously collectivist thinking from a conservative individualist. I thought we were all supposed to sink or swim on our own?

Tell It to Palin

In that same excerpt, substitute "groups" with "society" and apply Dave's observations to America's political discourse:

"Researchers ... have found that society has a high collective intelligence when members of society ... take turns speaking, when the inputs from each member are managed fluidly, when they detect each others’ inclinations and strengths."

Let's just hope our politicians never learn about this research. They might have to change the way they speak about issues and address their opponents. And that'd be hard! As Dave notes, with his customary perspicacity and facility for phrasing, "Participating in a well-functioning society is really hard." Yarp!

The Appeal Renewed

Please, New York Times. Thank Brooks for his hard work and contributions over the years, and give his space to someone with something fresh and interesting to say.

Extremely Grave, Extremely Gross

Today's column psychoanalyzing the Tuscon killer and the mainstream media -- moral equivalence, anyone? -- is a classic of the Brooksian form. Dave sets the theme by writing, "Accusations "that political actors contributed to the murder of 6 people, including a 9-year-old girl ... are extremely grave."

Leaving aside the dubious assertion that any serious observer has made a direct causal link between Sarah Palin's violent and reckless public vituperations -- and the weird term "political actors" -- why are misrepresentations and lies such as the "death panels" calumny of the late health care debate not "extremely grave"?

Little ironies

For that matter, why was it not "extremely grave" for people to bring loaded weapons to health care town hall meetings, a delicious little irony?

Why is it not "extremely grave" for a mentally unstable person to be allowed to buy a semiautomatic handgun, whose only purpose could be to kill people?

Why is it not "extremely grave" for prominent political figures to use blatantly violent and intimidating language and images in political discourse -- Palin's cross-hairs graphic and her "reload" remark; Sharron Angle's "Second Amendment remedies"; Bachman's "armed and dangerous" exhortation -- why were those not "extremely grave" public eruptions?

Palin's Death Wish

And what is it about Sarah Palin's obsession with death? Death panels, shooting a caribou with a telescopic rifle, stamping cross-hairs on political opponents, exhorting gun enthusiasts seriously aggrieved at government to "reload" -- David, if you want to psychoanalyze a public person, take a shot at Palin.

And finally, you gotta love Brooks's castigation of the "mainstream media." Hey, David? You work for the New York Times, NPR and PBS. It don't get more mainstream than that, so please acknowledge that you're no media iconoclast.

Obscure Reference Ticker: Leonard Pinth Garnell

In today's column, Dave cites that extremely well-known writer Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, "a research psychiatrist [who] writes in his book 'The Insanity Offense,' about 1 percent of the seriously mentally ill (or about 40,000 individuals) are violent." That 1 percent? That's about 99 percent greater than the number of people who have ever heard of Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, who sounds like a relation of E. Buzz Miller or Leonard Pinth Garnell.