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

But as near as I can tell they are basically a couple of big fat neocons with some gee-whiz mathematical gizmos.

The very little I've read makes your view look spot on to me with a little PJ O'Rourke BS mixed in for color.

uhhhh

old idea

I think it would be a lot more interesting to have a thread on Steven Levitt, FWIW.

David Brooks is way way too harmless and bumbling to ever seem like much of an "asshole." I mean, this is a guy who spent the fall getting regularly PWNED by Mark Shields, of all people. On PBS. Every now and then he dredges up a sentence that can almost pretend to be incendiary, but for the most part he's a total softy, a socially-"bobo" centrist who seems almost geezery and apologetic about his actual geek-conservatism. He's like if Richard Roeper grew up Bush.

all of whom are criminals, obv. one factor may be sufficient, but the combination seems to increase the likelihood.

Whereas the red states - coincidentally restricted in abortion - have more rural poverty. The rural poor didn't have as many alleviating social changes over the past decade or two. So is it any shock, say, that their rates of drug abuse (crime) stayed steady or rose?

Then there's also have the other, more disturbing facet of the reasoning (as nabisco alluded to) - lower crime is good, crime rates are highest among the poor, abortion lowers crime rates - aborting the poor lowers crime and is therefore good. It makes it easier, even unconsciously, to dehumanize and criminalize the poor.

My big problem problem with Levitt (maybe his academic research is better, but his pop-cult economics is what I've seen) is that it extrapolates a great deal from very little and then makes broad, ill-informed pronouncements from the data. ie it's the type of shit that belongs in a humor book or PJ O'Rourke column.

Everyone loves to quote the "abortion lowers crime" blurb but no one seems bothered to actually read what the man wrote in his book.

Fuck David Brooks, why are we talking about him? Also yeah can people start reposting NYT articles? I refuse to BUY a David Goddamn Brooks article.

Because you are president, you are briefed each day on terrorist threats to this country. These briefings are as psychologically intense as an episode of "24," with descriptions of specific bad guys and their activities.

This has had a cumulative effect on your psychology. While many of your fellow citizens have relaxed as 9/11 has faded into history, you don't have that luxury. Your briefings, and some terrifying false alarms that haven't been made public, keep you in a perpetual state of high alert.

You know that one of the few advantages we have over the terrorists is technological superiority. You are damned sure you are going to use every geek, every computer program and every surveillance technique at your disposal to prevent a future attack. You have inherited the FISA process to regulate this intelligence gathering. It's a pretty good process. FISA judges usually issue warrants quickly and, when appropriate, retroactively.

But the FISA process has shortcomings. First, it's predicated on a division between foreign and domestic activity that has been rendered obsolete by today's mobile communications methods. Second, the process still involves some cumbersome paperwork and bureaucratic foot-dragging. Finally, the case-by-case FISA method is ill suited to the new information-gathering technologies, which include things like automated systems that troll through vast amounts of data looking for patterns, voices and chains of contacts.

Over time you've become convinced that these new technologies, which are run by National Security Agency professionals and shielded from political influence, help save lives. You've seen that these new surveillance techniques helped foil an attack on the Brooklyn Bridge and bombing assaults in Britain. The question is, How do you regulate the new procedures to protect liberties?

Your aides present you with three options. First, you can ask Congress to rewrite the FISA law to keep pace with the new technologies. This has some drawbacks. How exactly do you write a law to cope with this fast-changing information war? Even if you could set up a procedure to get warrant requests to a judge, how would that judge be able to tell which of the thousands of possible information nodes is worth looking into, or which belongs to a U.S. citizen? Swamped in the data-fog, the courts would just become meaningless rubber-stamps. Finally, it's likely that some member of Congress would leak details of the program during the legislative process, thus destroying it.

Your second option is to avoid Congress and set up a self-policing mechanism using the Justice Department and the N.S.A.'s inspector general. This option, too, has drawbacks. First, it's legally dubious. Second, it's quite possible that some intelligence bureaucrat will leak information about the programs, especially if he or she hopes to swing a presidential election against you. Third, if details do come out and Congressional leaders learn you went around them, there will be blowback that will not only destroy the program, but will also lead to more restrictions on executive power.

Your third option is informal Congressional oversight. You could pull a few senior members of Congress into your office and you could say: "Look, given the fast-moving nature of this conflict, there is no way we can codify rules about what is permissible and impermissible. Instead we will create a social contract. I'll trust you by telling you everything we are doing to combat terror. You'll trust me enough to give me the flexibility I need to keep the country safe. If we have disagreements, we will work them out in private."

These are your three options, Mr. President, and these are essentially the three options George Bush faced a few years ago. (He chose Option 2.) But before you decide, let me tell you one more thing: Options 1 and 2 won't work, and Option 3 is impossible.

Options 1 and 2 won't work because they lead to legalistic rigidities and leaks that will destroy the program. Option 3 is impossible because it requires trust. It requires that the president and the Congressional leaders trust one another. It requires Democrats and Republicans to trust one another. We don't have that kind of trust in America today.

That leaves you with Option 4: Face the fact that we will not be using our best technology to monitor the communications of known terrorists. Face the fact that the odds of an attack on America just went up.

these "cellular" "telephones" represent a paradigm shift that our founders never intended

Sorry everyone else asked for it. :(

m.

this reminds me of the one bloom county strip where steve dallas cries when he finds out "knight rider" is a children's show.

“One of the things I’ve found in life is that politicians are a lot more sincere than us journalists and we are more sincere than the people that read and watch us.µ

vid here

On "Meet the Press," challenged on an assertion that 10,000 Iraqis will die every month if the U.S. pulls out, The New York Times columnist admits he just picked the number "out of the air."

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003615101

I saw the broadcast. He also implied that it's worth losing a few hundred Americans a month if it keeps 10,00,00o,00,000,000 Iraqis from dying. For once Bob Woodward acted like a journalist and went after him.

As much as I hate to defend Brooks, I think this is an unfair "gotcha" slam - he was obviously using the number 10,000 rhetorically to begin with. He's just trying to argue that even more Iraqis will die if we pull out, which may or may not be true but is not exactly an assertion "out of the air."

Given that so many generals, Bushies, neocons, and "experts" have offered their own out-of-the-air assertions since 2002, I'm prepared to slap the shit out of Brooks, especially after that slavish Bush column he wrote last week.

xpost

But Hurting, he's inserting an exact number to make a hypothetical scenario seem like a concrete actuality. Far from the worst of his crimes, but it highlights how slippery his support for his arguments typically is.

In other words, I'd let this go in many other cases, but Brooks deserves to be called out on this.

Ok, but advocates of withdrawal say stuff like "It can't get worse than it already is" all the time, which is just as hypothetical.

Besides, how literal-minded do you have to be to think that David Brooks is claiming to know exactly how many Iraqis will die per month?

the little cubes of Turkish Delight that tasted as good as the kind gobbled by Edmund in the C.S. Lewis classic.

david brooks has forgotten that book, tho he rereads the screwtape letters every christmas.

he screws himself every xmas

and tapes it

https://i.gyazo.com/946ac29c4ef5b5307d936ab1f7d052cc.png

His instinct pointed him to pink but he was able to correct himself and choose blue.

i don't get the point DB is making there and i don't get what sonny bunch means re: trump either

And I don't know what to do /
Now that pink has turned to blue

I strongly suspect he did a search and replace changing "orange" to "pink" between the first and second drafts of that column.

i don't get the point DB is making there and i don't get what sonny bunch means re: trump either

― goole, Friday, December 4, 2015 5:10 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

brooks goes on to argue that, like the pink rug, trump is the loud, appealing & fun first instinct for the republican electorate--but really, they should focus on more of a "blue rug" candidate that they can live with, like jeb bush.

sonny bunches of oats then jokes about the persuasive power of a rug shopping metaphor for a trump voter

I strongly suspect he did a search and replace changing "orange" to "pink" between the first and second drafts of that column.

― the top man in the language department (誤訳侮辱), Friday, December 4, 2015 5:42 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and "teal" to "blue"

wait -- how can anyone or anything be "subtler and more prosaic"?

"you'll tire of the electric vibrancy!" has gotta be the weakest antifascist appeal in the history of mass politics

lol

or is he still talking about his marriage?

he totally is. he thought he wanted the eye-catching pink! then too late, he realized all along, he was happy with the blue. Now the electric, vibrant option is telling him to throw out all his furniture and frankly, why can't you move into a cooler neighborhood

This is subtle dog whistling by Brooks. 'Pink' codes as 'red' as in red states and conservative republicanism, while 'blue' codes as blue states and democratic allegiance. He's signaling he is a RINO.

Two rugs diverged on a floor, and I
I bought the rug that popped my eye
Christ, I'm an asshole

nytimes a social experiment in what happens when all your editorial columnists are self-clowning ovens

the soft pink truth

I read this yesterday and was so happy i paid $2.50 for the paper

lol

lol eephus

It's 2 a.m. The bar is closing. Republicans have had a series of strong and nasty Trump cocktails. Suddenly Ted Cruz is beginning to look kind of attractive. At least he's sort of predictable, and he doesn't talk about his sexual organs in presidential debates!

@dick_nixon 3h
Conrad spoke two languages before English, you know. David Brooks ought to be boiled in oil for writing like this.

heh

Nixon didn't speak English either.

That's a pretty nonsensical metaphor.

oh he's really outdone himself with this one

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/opinion/sund4r-pichai-google-memo-diversity.html

on pins and needles waiting for his Charlottesville column

Ugh, the very thought makes me want to step off a bridge.

"David Brooks really has three jobs because he has to raise his wife," my fiance said

— Sarah Jones (@onesarahjones) March 4, 2021

rather condescending toward the wife

like giving vince carter a 6 at the dunk contest, come on

That's hilarious. Is it wrong that I find that hilarious?

“If Books Could Kill” covers David Brooks’ book

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/867-if-books-could-kill-104279346/episode/david-brookss-bobos-in-paradise-104750888/

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwwnCKLi5BMOW6L2Gg97bgI_iKYINBPZa

No Fair Remembering stuff has a series on Brooks.

from the bobo thing it's amusing to learn that brooks has the exact same approach to class analysis as those edgy left podcasters who've robbed "PMC" of any concrete meaning

PMC?

https://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/PMC

the professional-managerial class as conceptualised / later rejected as relevant concept by barbara ehrenreich, long since stripped of any material referents and turned into an all purpose woke/idpol/SJW equivalent by reactionary elements on the left

hearing more brooks classics it's no surprise obama was so shit with this kind of intellectual nourishment

his totally (by his own admission for once) imaginary scenario of a scat play fetish party cancelling an attendee for not recycling, presented as if he's making some kind of point, is hilarious and disturbing and probably where he accidentally peaked as a human being

he needs to stay the fuck away from joggers in parks

One of the worst paragraphs I’ve ever read pic.twitter.com/kZRfi2Ol0Y

— Hamilton Nolan (@hamiltonnolan) November 24, 2022

From the comments on above tweet about Brooks saying his ears were straight outa Compton—

In 1991 when David Brooks was a 30 year old man writing columns about how the Black people who make the music he likes deserve poverty and suffering, his current wife was six years old

— Hilary Agro 🍄 @hilarya✧✧✧@masto✧✧✧.l✧✧ (@hilaryagro) November 24, 2022

from the same column:

My body has matured; my tastes have not.

Then there are the times that are just awkward — like the time at a Nas concert when a seven-foot-tall woman in a black bodice came up to me and asked, “What on earth are you doing here?”

rejected Piano Man lyrics