RIP David Brooks

Also a lot of the stuff is just about his personal/social life, it's not like they're pointing out some Super PAC he runs or something.

yeah, disclosing his relationship with the israeli army is totally different and unrelated from raiding his facebook profile for pictures and "likes" that encourage readers to make assumptions about what he is like as a person.

It fits with Gawker/Jezebel's bad habit of trying to show that someone is a Bad Person instead of focussing on one egregious incident. It leaves a bad taste. If you think/know someone's done something wrong then stick to that - don't do an armchair audit of their whole life.

the gawker/jezebel tone is so toxic. it's weird to read an article i basically agree with (not this one) and still come away feeling gross.

it's the plague of my generation

haha

The info's all from his Facebook page; if anyone's going to go "His privacy!" about this I'm going to ask about this wonderful world you live in which is not here.
― Ned Raggett, Thursday, October 9, 2014 1:11 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ok ned, i'll lift whatever info i can about you from the internet and write a high-profile piece for a major website mocking you. that's exactly the same thing as you having a facebook profile, right?

to be clear i will not actually do this to ned. i was just making a point.

The info's all from his Facebook page; if anyone's going to go "His privacy!" about this I'm going to ask about this wonderful world you live in which is not here.

― Ned Raggett, Thursday, October 9, 2014 7:11 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Heart u Ned but come on, a private person putting stuff on Facebook doesn't make it ok for a big website or medium to use everything they can find to negatively profile someone just because his father is a douche. It's the stringing together of seemingly unrelated things to make up a profile fitting your idea of someone (or someone's father) that is the scariest thing about this.

David Brooks' son being in the Israeli army seems relevant at least to the extent that he does at times write about Israel. The rest of it is just kind of catty and pointless.

FWIW, I've taken the responses on board and have been thinking off and on about it for the past half hour. The larger points about expectations of privacy/guilt-by-association are well taken. (Though frankly any guy from a fraternity who likes Tucker Max makes me a little skeeved separate from anything else; still, I'm not about to grill every last person who unironically likes the Chive or whatever.) And I'll admit the funniest part to me besides the headline, per Alfred's post, was Podhoretz fully embracing his bitter bastard persona at last; then again I did post the direct link so I can't not own that. Likely wouldn't post it now.

Still, though -- building off Milton Parker said, is it just the world that Gawker made or also something else? I keep thinking about news stories from all over the place essentially now regularly talking about photos on social media, posts, etc. when it comes to someone that figures in it, for whatever reason. I guess I'm more jaded than I realize but I honestly wasn't *surprised* that this could happen, and that may be my own burden to bear.

I guess I'm just kind of disappointed to see articles that amount to "Hey look at this fuggin guy," let alone about non-public figures.

But that said, look at this fuggin guy:
http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowldc/files/2013/01/Podhoretz_Swim.jpg

First line in today's column: "George Eliot was an emotionally needy young woman."

followed by an account of their prom date

Yet what do we mean when we use the word meaning?

oh boy he's going with Clinton-style epistemology

is he dead yet?

well, he's braindead

colleges should invite terrible speakers more often because hebdo

Op-Ed Columnist
I Am Not Charlie Hebdo
By DAVID BROOKS

Not sure I want to read this

absolutely sure I don't

I Am Not David Brooks

Not sure I want to read this

If you read my comment above yours, you've already read it

picturing this column accompanied by a picture of Brooks in a t-shirt that reads "I AM DAVID BROOKS"

lol u guys it's so bad though

To be fair, he's not saying that people who speak out against racial or religious insults are exactly the same as people who walk into an office and murder people. Just, you know, there's a continuum. To be safe, we should stop calling people racists.

Yet what do we mean when we use the word meaning?

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, January 8, 2015 1:57 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

in homage to the events in paris, david brooks will be channeling jacques derrida in this week's column

Let me put it this way: If we look at the people in history who achieved great things — like Nelson Mandela or Albert Schweitzer or Abraham Lincoln — it wasn’t because they wanted to bathe luxuriously in their own sense of meaningfulness. They had objective and eternally true standards of justice and injustice. They were indignant when those eternal standards were violated. They subscribed to moral systems — whether secular or religious — that recommended specific ways of being, and had specific structures of what is right and wrong, and had specific disciplines about how you might get better over time.

Even remotely, distantly comparing people protesting a campus speaker to people actually shooting up a newspaper is just so insidious it's unbelievable.

http://images.politico.com/global/2012/10/121030_david_brooks_605_ap.jpg

Let me put it this way.

Let me tell you, in an eleven-word sentence, about "the people who achieved great things."

Ridicule becomes less fun as you become more aware of your own frequent ridiculousness.

that must be an excruciatingly long and slow process for him

wicked subtweet

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/11/when-values-disappear/?_r=1

That posting is a nice rebuttal to Kristoff's misinterpretation of WJW as well as to Brook's absurd let's punish non-college going Dads for their lack of morals and values thing in a recnet column of his(based on Brooks misinterpretation of Putnam's new Our Kids book)

every time i open this thread

http://stack-dog.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/0571AE26-7118-4B22-9810-B37B1C100BAE_zpszc2oknoh.png

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/for-david-brooks-the-rich-are-people-the-poor-are-numbers-20150311#ixzz3UG7EQzeE

Matt Taibi v. Brooks

Brooks is EXCITED about Marco Rubio! He has *ideas*!

On his first day in office, he handed each legislator a book with the cover “100 Innovative Ideas for Florida’s Future.” The pages were blank. He was inviting his members to fill them in — a nice collaborative touch.

well, I guess that's one way to look at it...

my dad has a blank book titled everything i know about sailing; where's his bobodorsement

http://i.imgur.com/sQGxpot.jpg

Easy target but couldn't resist.

"Despite all these efforts, there are too many young men leading lives like the one Gray led. He was apparently a kind-hearted, respectful, popular man, but he was not on the path to upward mobility. He won a settlement for lead paint poisoning. According to The Washington Post, his mother was a heroin addict who, in a deposition, said she couldn’t read. In one court filing, it was reported that Gray was four grade levels behind in reading. He was arrested more than a dozen times."

this is a more fucked up way to frame the situation than just saying something outright racist.

dude was beaten to death for no reason and brooks feels the need to scrutinize his academic record

Without connecting it to the fact that he was sufficiently exposed to lead paint at a young age to merit a large settlement. And connecting that to our failures in cities generally.

Like, the connection between lead exposure, brain damage and antisocial behavior is sufficiently well-established that not taking the next step in THAT little mental journey is beyond irresponsible. If you feel like that's the nut of this story, tell the whole damned story.

I mean, Brooks does address that stuff but he says the failure has to do with the culture of poverty -- avoiding that specific buzz phrase of course because it is rightly derided now. He sees Gray as a "victim" but doesn't point his finger at the institutional racism that is enshrined in policy on the federal, state, and local level. That's what's so insidious about him.

He's not crude enough to say "Freddie Gray was a thug and it's his own fault." He blames "systems" just not ones he could be seen as complicit in upholding.

and also freddie gray as far as we know didn't engage in much antisocial behavior -- brooks admits as much. and even if he did, that is immaterial. the penalty for whatever it is he might have done over the course of his life isn't supposed to be death.