I always knew David Brooks was an asshole ....

David Brooks talks out of like three to five different sides of his mouth in any given column

I thought I saw somewhere Obama reads Brooks' column regularly and values his viewpoint, it was a depressing moment, hope I was imagining it

Obama does read it, I wonder how he feels about being called a wimp by noted hardcore alpha male David Brooks

sad that he reads/"values" Brooks's opinion, but somehow that makes sense to me, maybe even explains something about Obama

this guy reminds me of when the onion runs one of those editorial/thinkpieces on politics by a seven-year-old or whatever.

xpost

i think that's obama in populist mode, i.e. "i, too, read these brazenly mediocre columns in the NYT."

"I'm just a regular guy, I read the same smug priveleged assholes as joe lunchpail!"

lol reading

I give credit to Brooks for even supporting the inheritance tax. I also think he has a fair point that if the inequality issue is nothing more than the upper-middle-class envying the upper-upper-middle class, then maybe it's not such a big deal. However, obviously the inequality issue is about a lot more than that. Brooks doesn't mention anything about how this dynamic affects the distribution of political power, or the social dynamic in a society in which inherited wealth begins to play a large role. Maybe because he doesn't buy Piketty's arguments that we are headed that way. But his breezy dismissal of Piketty's careful arguments lacks substance.

I also think he has a fair point that if the inequality issue is nothing more than the upper-middle-class envying the upper-upper-middle class, then maybe it's not such a big deal.

How is this a "fair point" given no real evidence that that's the case?

However, obviously the inequality issue is about a lot more than that. Brooks doesn't mention anything about how this dynamic affects the distribution of political power, or the social dynamic in a society in which inherited wealth begins to play a large role.

But this is the big DUH point about the whole issue that every conservative pundit DELIBERATELY glosses over, reducing inequality to "I eat at Per Se you eat at Outback, I drive a Rolls you drive a Ford, what's the big deal?"

also I'd quibble with "begins to play a large role"

basically stop being "fair" to david fucking brooks

Another signature Brooks attempt to incisively analyze "the left" that is almost wholly projection

Also lots of clunky half-hearted 8th grade book report prose in here

Well, of course, this book is going to set off a fervor that some have likened to Beatlemania.

The book is very good and interesting, but it has pretty obvious weaknesses.

Piketty predicts that growth will be low for a century, though there seems to be a lot of innovation around.

I don't know why it's hard for me to hate Brooks as much as he clearly deserves.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/ten-miles-square/2014/05/i_dont_know_whether_this_point050439.php#

Brooks says Simpson-Bowles-like commissions push populist reforms. Author of the piece questions Brooks' understanding of populism and democracy

Author of the piece questions Brooks' understanding of populism and democracy

No surprise. Brooks said a month ago on NPR with one of his trademark embarrassed chuckles that he wished we were ruled by elites.

His favorite books: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/23/opinion/brooks-really-good-books-part-i.html?rref=opinion&module=Ribbon&version=origin®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&pgtype=article

David Brooks has taken his valuable NYTimes column inches to inform his readers that George Orwell and Leo Tolstoy are good writers.

His other lesson for writers, even opinion writers, is that it’s a mistake to think you are an activist, championing some movement. That’s the path to mental stagnation. The job is just to try to understand what’s going on.

But I digress, next on my list of white male writers...

People are always asking me what my favorite books are.

instant lol

Hi, I'm David Brooks

I've read books.

he wished we were ruled by elites.

it must be awesome to have your wishes fulfilled so easily

i thought this was a lovely brooks column:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/06/opinion/brooks-president-obama-was-right.html

He spent his NPR segment praising the president.

i was kinda down on this decision. since after the shalit trade i've been feeling very cynical about these prisoner swaps (and brooks only refs it obliquely but sometimes you don't even get a living soldier in return). but he makes i think a very rational and on some level moving case about why it's honorable to do so.

you needed david brooks for that? jesus

Despite all our polarization, we do accept the election results, even when the other party wins

o rly

compared to lots of other "democracies" accepting election results is one of our strongest areas!

ffs balls does everything need a snarky remark? xxp

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/05/david-brooks-is-not-buying-it-poor-people.html

The Brooks column on Baltimore might have been discussed on another thread, but i like this response to it, questioning Brooks' use of stats on poverty and ignoring inequality

This is some of what Brooks considers important in discussing Robert E Lee and whether his name should be banished from schools. I think its weird

As a family man, he was surprisingly relaxed and affectionate. We think of him as a man of marble, but he loved having his kids jump into bed with him and tickle his feet. With his wife’s loving cooperation, he could write witty and even saucy letters to other women. He was devout in his faith, a gifted watercolorist, a lover of animals and a charming conversationalist.

https://www.change.org/p/legally-change-david-brooks-name-to-this-fuckn-guy

a gifted watercolorist

saucy

ticklish feet

Let me tell you this! And you're hearing this straight from the horse. Hitler was better looking than Churchill. He was a better dresser than Churchill. He had more hair! He told funnier jokes! And he could dance the pants off of Churchill!

https://www.change.org/p/legally-change-david-brooks-name-to-this-fuckn-guy

Aww man was gonna sign the shit out of that

If you've got time for a little copywriting we could make it happen...

Robert E. Lee is the best advertisement the confederacy ever had. He gets off easy because his only job was to win battles and he did that extremely well, and he perfectly matched the contemporary ideal of what a gentleman ought to be. He was the confederacy's dreamboat.

If you want to see what the confederacy was really about you need to look at the figure of Jefferson Davis, not Lee. He personified the cause far better, in that he was the one who most prominently and vigorously defended its ideas, not its territory. And its ideas were execrable.

He gets off easy because his only job was to win battles and he did that extremely well

well, until he didn't.

actually, Alexander Stephens is even more representative. Wilson's Patriotic Gore has an unforgettable chapter devoted to him, in which Wilson, enemy of the Cold War and income tax, read Stephens' prison writings and saw in them a noble, futile resistance to the central government.

give lee his due as a general. the south's military ability was amply demonstrated. it was their economic and political culture that was rotten, rotten, rotten. it is a shame so much of that culture survived the debacle.

The South wasn't all rotten, the further away, by several measures, that you look from Cotten, and the feudalist fuckheads who called it King. For instance, far from the Black Belt, when Alabama left the Union, Winston County left Alabama, at least in terms of proclaiming itself the Free State of Winston. Until the Rebel Rebel Govt. of same, having taken refuge way back in the hills, had their subterranean HQ's location betrayed by one of the very few local slaveowners. There was a Unionist (and sometimes anarchist) resistance, especially in Appalachia, but all through the hijacked CSA, to varying degrees. Confederate conscription efforts could get pretty bloody.

Limits of (free white) manpower and domestic manufacture of materiel(because dominance/fixation on plantations etc) were built-in fails, despite whoever was a military genius etc

i'm sure that Rommel (Nazi Germany's equivalent of Robert E Lee) had a similarly cozy twee home life.

i can only assume that there is no editorial oversight at the NYT for Brooks.

the myth of a united south is possibly the single most destructive myth about the civil war; a considerable number of southerners (possibly a majority in every state except south carolina) opposed secession and hundreds of thousands of southerners went north to fight for the union.

hundreds of thousands of southerners went north to fight for the union.

According to Wikipedia, 2,213,363 men served in the Union Army during the Civil War, so this 'number' seems well within possibility.

Dear Ta-Nehisi Coates,

The last year has been an education for white people. There has been a depth, power and richness to the African-American conversation about Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston and the other killings that has been humbling and instructive.

Your new book, “Between the World and Me,” is a great and searing contribution to this public education. It is a mind-altering account of the black male experience. Every conscientious American should read it.

There is a pervasive physicality to your memoir — the elemental vulnerability of living in a black body in America. Outside African-American nightclubs, you write, “black people controlled nothing, least of all the fate of their bodies, which could be commandeered by the police; which could be erased by the guns, which were so profligate; which could be raped, beaten, jailed.”

Written as a letter to your son, you talk about the effects of pervasive fear. “When I was your age the only people I knew were black and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid.”

But the disturbing challenge of your book is your rejection of the American dream. My ancestors chose to come here. For them, America was the antidote to the crushing restrictiveness of European life, to the pogroms. For them, the American dream was an uplifting spiritual creed that offered dignity, the chance to rise.

ok is that real