RIP David Brooks

It actually is worth reading this 2003 Weekly Standard piece by David Brooks. It's an incredible masterpiece of vanity and blindness, it's like listening to someone wearing a bright red shirt screaming about people who are so stupid they wear red shirts. https://t.co/laZ3ejuuuo pic.twitter.com/o5wExMIfsc

— Jon Schwarz (@schwarz) December 5, 2018

amazing that you can include the phrase 'Now that the war in Iraq is over' in a piece from april 2003 and then go on to get even more wrong but david brooks is equal to the task

Then there is the dream palace of the Europeans. In this palace, America is a bigger threat to world peace than Saddam Hussein. America is the land of rotting cities, the electric chair, serial killers, gun-crazed hunters, shallow materialists, religious nuts, savage capitalists, the all-powerful Jewish lobby, the oil lobby, the military-industrial complex, and bloodthirsty cowboy-presidents.

this is otm tho

#hesrunning pic.twitter.com/HvcAYQnYYu

— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) December 5, 2018

In the dream palace of David Brooks, America is the land of self-effacing, highly competent white men in dark suits who quietly run the entire world to everyone's benefit, despite the world's shameful lack of gratitude.

Then there is the dream palace of the Europeans. In this palace, America is a bigger threat to world peace than Saddam Hussein. America is the land of rotting cities, the electric chair, serial killers, gun-crazed hunters, shallow materialists, religious nuts, savage capitalists, the all-powerful Jewish lobby, the oil lobby, the military-industrial complex, and bloodthirsty cowboy-presidents.

this is otm tho

― We're in 2009—it's time to take risks, (bizarro gazzara), Wednesday, December 5, 2018 7:45 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he's so close to getting it

minus the jewish bit

What lessons will they draw from the events of the past month? How will the fall of Saddam affect their voting patterns, their approach to the next global crisis? One way to think about this is to conduct a thought experiment. Invent a representative 20-year-old, Joey Tabula-Rasa, and try to imagine how he would have perceived the events of the past month.

Joey doesn't know much about history; he was born in 1983 and was only 6 when the Berlin Wall fell. He really has no firm idea of what labels like liberal and conservative mean. But now he is in college, and he's been glued to the cable coverage of the war and is ready to form some opinions. Over the past months, certain facts and characters have entered his consciousness, like characters in a play he is seeing for the first time.

The first character is America itself. He sees that his country is an incredibly effective colossus that can drop bombs onto pinpoints, destroy enemies that aren't even aware they are under attack. He sees a ruling establishment that can conduct wars with incredible competence and skill. He sees a federal government that can perform its primary task--protecting the American people--magnificently.

weird to think that Joey Tabula-Rasa is now 35

at least he's not pretending his imaginary cabbie is real.

the real character of america was the colossus we saw along the way

bozhe moi!

that whole passage is so wrong, and so long, and so so beautiful

an incredibly effective colossus that can drop bombs onto pinpoints

Brooks swallowed the War Department "smart bomb" propaganda hook, line and sinker. Compared to Vietnam's B-52 bomb-dumps, it contains a pinch of truth, but 'pinpoints'? get real.

At 0:23, Brooks describes Cohen's testimony and the North Korea summit as "Just another week in Caligula's Rome."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPHF1LkkY1Q

i think that makes david brooks flaccus

I want to thank whoever first posted one of those Brooks & Shields segments itt back in the summer of 2017, because ever since then I've watched the PBS News Hour pretty much every day, and it's the only news I watch because it's the only major source that isn't hysterical and bombastic. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Wow, impressed with the esoteric reference. Doubt anyone has pointed out that historical resonance yet.

this thread always disappoints.

rushomancy dishes up Flaccus in response to a ho-hum Caligula reference and you find this disappointing?

lol at the evidence of a long argument on that page about if it should be called Pogrom or Riots:

The Alexandrian pogrom,[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11] or Alexandrian riots,[12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27] were attacks directed against Jews in 38 CE in Roman Alexandria, Egypt.

TBC my snark was for Brooks not for rush

There seems to be a line of thought among neo-Nazis that the Alexandrian pogrom/riots of 38 CE are a seminal event in the 'History of Whites vs. Jews' and they, ofc, take the side of the Whites. My search on "Flaccus Caligula" turned up some links to neo-Nazi websites.

rushomancy dishes up Flaccus in response to a ho-hum Caligula reference and you find this disappointing?

― A is for (Aimless), Wednesday, March 6, 2019 6:34 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"RIP David Brooks"

[12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27]

wow, this extended version of "Sheena Is A Punk Rocker" is not as good as i'd hoped.

Lol

I don’t think trump is so different than caligula. Brooks otm.

I know everyone on here loves trump, but I just have to state my truth.

thank you for your courage

✊

let's extend brooks' caligula comparison to its logical conclusion and assume that he expects, if not outright desires, trump to be assassinated by his own bodyguards

for the sake of national security it's imperative that the dangerous radical david brooks be extradited to a special-ops blacksite for enhanced interrogation asap

No.

There are way more virulent figures in the commentariat than Brooks. He just irritates people because he is in the New York Times and people think every idea there should be ilx-friendly.

If every “conservative” in American became more like Brooks and less like Hannity... we would still be in bad shape but our situation would be far more manageable.

Wow, impressed with the esoteric reference. Doubt anyone has pointed out that historical resonance yet.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive)

thanks y'all!

rant incoming!

i'm not a historian or any sort of professional on the topic of roman historiography. i know about flaccus the same way y'all know about flaccus - reading about him on wikipedia.

i do get very particularly annoyed when i read facile analogies like brooks'. there are always these men who cast themselves as defenders of some Grand Intellectual Tradition because of some old tv show they saw on the public broadcasting station they keep trying to defund.

i saw that tv show too, and i enjoyed it, but robert graves isn't a historian, and john hurt isn't caligula.

i don't know a whole lot about roman history. i know a little bit about american history. i know american history, from its inception, has been full of a whole lot of self-important men pretending like they're romans while not actually knowing very much about ancient rome itself.

i'm not a historian, but i know they exist, i know history wasn't something that was chiseled in stone at the time it happens, it's something that's re-examined and re-written over and over again through the ages. that while america is not rome, has never been and never will be rome, there are certain patterns in history that occur, patterns that can be re-discovered through the lens of the current age.

every age, yes, has its tyrants, and trump is certainly one for our age. every age also has its hypocritical and mealy-mouthed sycophants, its unprincipled second-rate schemers and connivers who try and get ahead like the tyrants do but wind up undone and largely unremembered.

history may lionize tyrants like genghis khan. it may have a perverse fascination with tyrants like caligula. i do not like to prognosticate, but i will make an exception here: history will never vindicate men like flaccus.

If every “conservative” in American became more like Brooks and less like Hannity... we would still be in bad shape but our situation would be far more manageable.

also brooks is so stupid. like “better than hannity” is a low bar. we deserve better

better than better than hannity

We shouldn’t joke/fantasize about people getting tortured.

When it’s someone who is causing immense harm and
is protected by vast power, like Trump, I understand the impulse as an expression of anger and desperation. But that isn’t the case with Brooks. He is a center-right newspaper columnist who is mostly famous for being a dork.

I used Hannity as a counter-example because he is a propagandist who spreads dangerous misinformation to an impressionable base everyday.

Trump wishes he were more like Caligula, who he surely does not know, but he's more like Count Chocula, with whom he is certainly more familiar.

We shouldn’t joke/fantasize about people getting tortured.

When it’s someone who is causing immense harm and
is protected by vast power, like Trump, I understand the impulse as an expression of anger and desperation. But that isn’t the case with Brooks. He is a center-right newspaper columnist who is mostly famous for being a dork.

i'd argue that brooks, as a public figure who advocated strongly for the iraq war, did actually help cause immense harm to hundreds of thousands of people in the middle east so i feel just fine about posts where i joke about him being on the receiving end of a tiny fraction of the horror he supported so glibly, and for which he has never apologised

So many people supported that war including hillary clinton. No one thinks it’s cool to joke about her getting dragged to a blacksite.

no i'm cool with that too tbh

Fine, we’re different.

maybe if politicians had to consider facing trial for war crimes they'd be less inclined to commit them

Yes, a trial. Because that was your point in saying he should be secretly dragged to a black site and tortured.

David Brooks should die suddenly and peacefully in a piano-moving accident

There we go.

It even had the benefit of being funny and not sickening.

David Brooks should die suddenly and peacefully in a testicle-crushing accident.

No Hilllary fan here but she didn't write a column as recently as October right in the middle of this shitstorm wittingly and disingenuously substituing "Nationalism" for patriotism

he should be made to see the piano arriving from a great height

Execution by piano for that column seems too much.