RIP David Brooks

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.

David Brooks should be arrested on unclear charges and sent on a labyrinthine journey through various courts and prisons until he realizes his guilt of the ultimate crime: being David Brooks.

like a dog!

it's a false dichotomy to say that if only we were ruled by folks like david brooks we'd be better off than the folks we have now. the whole punditocracy and political class that david brooks, in his feeble way, represents, is one of the reasons we are where we are now, even if brooks himself might tsk tsk some of the more garish expressions of the moment.

I never said that but fine.

I said that the kind of gallows humor/fantasizing about someone getting brutally tortured makes sense when it’s someone who is directly oppressing you—even though it’s still not my thing. When you just talk that way about everyone you dislike it’s just grotesque and dehumanizing.0

And i do think brooks is a different kind of figure than hannity, as hannity is an active propagandist for the president, who advises him informally and all the rest.

jesus christ

I just said joking about torture was in bad taste!

treesh does display certain Christ-like qualities

There were actual people dragged to CIA black sites, it’s not an abstract, zany misfortune to joke about befalling conservative columnists.

nah i think it is

it's definitely wrong to say that david brooks should be extradited to a special-ops blacksite for enhanced interrogation, he should be guillotined after a fair trial

Should be condemned to a life of daily correspondence with Tom Friedman, and Tom Friedman only, and vice versa

I never said that but fine.

i... don't think i was even responding to you?

Sometimes you change your mind in ways you never could have imagined. https://t.co/CTIfZ3QY36

— David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) March 8, 2019

"Reparations are a drastic policy and hard to execute"

Jesus christ you guys walked on the moon, detonated an atom bomb, have massive destroyer ships on every ship and built the internet. Can we stop talking about reparations like it is some monumental task.

Jesus christ you guys walked on the moon, detonated an atom bomb, have massive destroyer ships on every ship and built the internet. Can we stop talking about reparations like it is some monumental task.

― Van Horn Street

except for "walking on the moon", this can pretty much be filed under "white guys breaking shit". i'm willing to grant the professed incompetence of white dudes, and if they're not up to the challenge of reparations they should find something easier to do with their lives than trying to implement just governance.

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

― 27 Discounts ILXors Get Only If They Know (WmC)

yesterday my newsfeed suggested an article about a shadowy billionaire dying in a botched penis-enlargement surgery. at the time i wasn't sure why google thought i would be interested. now i understand.

tbf walking on the moon seems pretty hard

walking on the moon was also ultimately in service to the cause of white guys breaking shit

walking on the moon is a cop

walking on the moon is a police song

walking on the moon is a snack imo

obligatory

"If Stalin had a Smartphone"

Sometimes you change your mind in ways you never could have imagined.

This seems like the line that would be on the bottom of the poster for a really bad movie about David Brooks getting a black friend

Each would learn something from the other

Hahahaha

it would win best picture

it did.

again

rod dreher has had enough of these scurrilous scurrilisms

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D5ZvFI3X4AE6cQs.jpg:small

wait...what's going on?

he published a book

yes. I and everyone I know can't get enough of gossiping about David Brooks and his wife. it's an all-consuming passion.

It's pretty ridiculous to presume evangelical religiosity is relevant on the subject of premarital sex, except insofar as there's more hypocrisy and guilt.