RIP David Brooks

david brooks actually cracked me up on the news hour on friday. he called trump an anti-mentor. everyone he helps becomes worse. his whole trump thing was good actually.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3MXqcoPkMM

lol that was funny

http://pinstor.us/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/antimonitor.jpg

/pol/ with a graduate degree has logged on. pic.twitter.com/cvlZtPfHRQ

— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) August 1, 2017

800+ words on manliness and what the greeks would think of today's masculine ideals, somehow no mention of the fact that in ancient greece men loved to fuck each other

thats pretty manly

too manly for brooks, clearly

the greeks were pro-gay sex, anti-gay marriage

brooks is terrible but he had a line on tv the other week (after spicer quit?) about trump being an "anti-mentor" that was good

8 posts up

ah yes that's probably where i saw it

yeah i watched another one of those Brooks & Shields videos last Friday, it was equally good. he's a good talking head!

ok, this theory from a friend checks out pic.twitter.com/w3WaGzMOJ3

— Peter Finocchiaro (@PLFino) August 1, 2017

oh hell yes

does brooks actually have a graduate degree or just the underserved confidence of a man with one

the latter. daddy was an english prof tho.

you just made me go check whether david brooks was the son of cleanth brooks, which would have messed my mind up bad

The manliest virtue is leaving your wife who you made change her first name for your assistant on a book called "The Road to Character"

— Will 🐋 Menaker (@willmenaker) August 1, 2017

ouch

daddy was an english prof tho.

genetic memory right?

Modesty means having the courage to rest in anxiety and not try to quickly escape it. Modesty means being tough enough to endure the pain of uncertainty and coming to appreciate that pain. Uncertainty and anxiety throw you off the smug island of certainty and force you into the free waters of creativity and learning. As Kierkegaard put it, “The more original a human being is, the deeper is his anxiety.”

Over the next few months I’m hoping to write several columns on why modesty and moderation are superior to the spiraling purity movements we see today. It seems like a good time for assertive modesty to take a stand.

"assertive modesty"

*masturbates modestly*

now we're speaking my language!

man who makes his living writing doggerel at length about concepts he has all of a sudden pulled out of his ass and decided are key to living the good life thinks he knows dick on a stick about modesty

The son of Cleanth and Garth Brooks

pretty sure everyone's seen that overt/covert white supremacy pyramid graphic that's been making the rounds, but the thing that sticks with me, especially in the face of comments like Brooks's, is that anything not explicitly in the overt category gets tagged as a "purity movement" or as imaginary

as if racism and a social divide ceases to exist if no one is actively screaming about it

truly the people who claim they're being discriminated against when no one is shouting epithets in their faces, they are the real racists

so still not dead?

David Brooks and Tombot can't stand those "purity movements"

do not book them on a cruise to the smug island of certainty

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=34035

Brooks' support for Damore is not an isolated example of contrarianism. I've been posting for more than a decade about his confused but consistent interest in the science of prejudice.

i love language log but these types of exercises presuppose that brooks has ever written a single word in good faith

i can't imagine looking at david brooks and seeing a real human there

got to buy it!

https://store.thebaffler.com/collections/successitudes/products/david-brooks-toilet-paper

the thought of brooks' smug face passing over my sphincter is making me want to never take a shit again

yeah the only toilet paper i've ever bought with someone's face on it was Osama Bin Laden in the fall of 2001

osamathumbsup.jpg

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DIFXwi3VYAA1erZ.jpg

is that short for pajamas

meets pajama requirement

Please, Jerk, Make Sense

In all honesty I actually do think McArdle is good at the form and this is probably a good course!

Jesus, this one

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/25/opinion/this-american-land.html

Taibbi, Pareene and one of the Chapo guys read it on the Tarfu Report and it's so fucking amazing to hear actual humans read this garbage out loud.

And why does he refer to Teddy Roosevelt as TR?!

are they still doing the helium thing or did they run out? :)

They ran out. Now it's a drinking game.

I had a Brooks moment at dinner last night

This local restaurant, kind of a neighborhood place with pretty generic american fare prepared well, has some menu item with a title like "Chef's Favorite Chicken."

The waitress explained to us that it is, in fact, Chicken Souvlaki but they were puzzled it wasn't getting ordered very much so they changed the name. It's now one of their most popular dishes

Customer base is mostly white midwesterners, middle class income, seemed to be mostly people 50+ years old and a handful of families with kids

so not the typical Slowdive audience

http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-gets-story-on-wage-growth-and-productivity-completely-wrong

"multiculturalism is the theology of the educated class" I don't think David Brooks interacts with nonwhite people https://t.co/s44YbHyNgI

— Bree Newsome (@BreeNewsome) September 26, 2017

jesus christ he continues to excel at being a fucking idiot, but ever since someone posted a video of him on PBS with Mark Shields, I've been watching their segments p regularly... he comes off so much better in that context, & never says anything dumb or particularly conservative. Maybe he farms this shit out.

the pbs brooksbot is programmed to appeal to pbs viewers. the nyt brooks algorithm is programmed to appeal to a tribe of ancient demons who will soon emerge from hibernation to reclaim dominion over all humanity I think

jesus christ he continues to excel at being a fucking idiot, but ever since someone posted a video of him on PBS with Mark Shields, I've been watching their segments p regularly... he comes off so much better in that context, & never says anything dumb or particularly conservative. Maybe he farms this shit out.

― flappy bird,

same on NPR. These venues keep him employed and on the lecture circuit.

Lately I've been thinking about whether Bret Stephens may in fact be worse than David Brooks, and whether he deserves his own thread