Shut Up, David Brooks

I Invented This Tumblr I Can Haz Money Plz?

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 07:59:00 -0400

Tom Friedman loves outsourcing. You can tell because he managed to outsource 85% of his column today. But unfortunately, that leaves room for 15% Tom Friedman originals:

Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job.

Is it irony if the literal meaning of the words is falsified by the very existence of the person who’s writing them down? I better go email an Ivy League professor and ask them.

Tears of a Clown

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 07:40:00 -0400

Ross Douthat is willing to (passive-aggressively) concede defeat in this skirmish of the culture wars, but he would like liberals to stop being so mean to the Catholic Church, please:

Such honesty would make social liberals more magnanimous in what looks increasingly like victory, and less likely to hound and harass religious institutions that still want to elevate and defend the older marital ideal.

It’s true that many people associate the words ‘Catholic Church’ and ‘victims,’ but probably not for the reason Ross Douthat is suggesting. This is sort of like the equivalent of a bully taking your lunch money every single goddamn day, and then you finally graduate and get a job and someone suggests you “magnanimously” take the bully out for drinks once a week, your treat. I suppose what I’m saying is, if you are gay and planning a wedding reception, do make it open bar, but don’t invite Ross Douthat.

Of Crispex and Covenants

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 04:51:00 -0500

This week, David Brooks went all the way to an impressive store in Midwood to be impressed by the fact that there are such things as vegan cheese puffs and household products designed to obviate the need for any kind of work whatsoever. David Brooks probably bought a Coke at a gas station in Connecticut once and now whenever he wants a Coke he drives to Connecticut and buys it at that gas station, because apparently David Brooks does not notice that these things are EVERYWHERE ALL THE TIME. Like birth control snarfing twenty-something Wiccans, or Orthodox Jewish babies. But this line, I think, has to win the prize for Oblivious Statement of the Week*:

For the people who shop at Pomegranate, the collective covenant with God is the primary reality and obedience to the laws is the primary obligation. They go shopping like the rest of us, but their shopping is minutely governed by an external moral order.

David, you horse-gobbling psychopath. Have you never even BEEN inside a Whole Foods?

*Don’t worry, Tom, we’ll be accepting entries through Sunday.

There Will Be Bracelets.

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 07:54:11 -0500

David Brooks did not take his Ritalin this week. But that’s okay, because David Brooks would not want to be an American-style learner, you guys. American students tease nerds and grow up to be Kevin Spacey’s character in ‘House of Cards’. Chinese students staple their hair to the ceiling to hold up their heads while they study and grow up to be ~~awesome board game players~~ brutal cybermercantilists. Navigating this dilemma obviously requires forming something that might be called by a name that even a six year-old Canadian child would have a hard time taking seriously, and telling the meanies that “If you join our friendship circle and abide by our norms, the benefits will be overwhelming, but if you stay outside, the costs will be devastating.” Which is true because I saw this exact strategy used to great effect on like every episode of Gossip Girl.

xoDavidBrooks

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 17:48:00 -0500

Life advice from yours truly. And dammit, I was so close on this one, you guys!

I used to tell young journalists to start out writing crime stories somewhere. Now I tell them to produce Web pages that link and comment on the best pieces in the national press. The big editors will look to your site if you write obsessively about them.

But no, seriously, it’s great to know that whaling is still a viable career option.

Oops, sorry, brb

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 17:00:21 -0500

SUDB has been going through some personal issues (cough detoxing from tobacco cough DAMN YOU DATA). Turns out 87% of our sense of humor was composed entirely of nicotine (the other 13% was carbon monoxide, OBVIOUSLY). But fear not, we’re rebuilding (Tom Friedman knows a guy in Micronesia and we are outsourcing the reconstruction of our wit and oh my god you guys the CLOUD) and we will be back soon, very soon. If I’d just listened to David Brooks and my gut, I swear to god you guys, I’d have spent the last two weeks banging out caustic takedowns in a cloud of sweet, toxic, stimulating death.

When David Brooks says, "future," you say, "dystopian"!

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 03:08:26 -0500

David Brooks thinks we, as a nation, need to think more about the future. Unless you’re old, in which case, definitely don’t think about the future, because we’re about to gut your medicare and social security and retirement benefits to pay for the youngs. Bring on the corporate tax breaks and environmentally destructive oil pipelines!

Almost There, Paul Krugman!

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 07:16:46 -0500

Paul Krugman thinks Tom Friedman is too close to conventional wisdom (warning: video will play and people near you will hear the words “Tom Friedman”). Far be it from me to disagree with PK, but wherever Tom Friedman is, I am pretty sure it’s miles and miles from any kind of wisdom.

Great Column, Pal!

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 03:16:18 -0500

You guys, I really hoped this was going to be a column about Star Trek. I did. Because David Brooks getting mixed up in philosophy and data is a little like a five year-old getting mixed up in pixie sticks and a pack of Marlboro reds. All you get in the end is a big fucking mess, and possibly, tears.

For the next year, David Brooks is going to tackle the tenets of data-ism. Untruths like:

… data is a transparent and reliable lens that allows us to filter out emotionalism and ideology; that data will help us do remarkable things — like foretell the future.

Blah blah blah blah quantitative analyses blah blah sample sizes p-values blah. Let’s be honest: what we really want to know is, if you were a Beatle, which Beatle would you be?

We think of John Lennon as the most intellectual of the Beatles, but, in fact, Paul McCartney’s lyrics had more flexible and diverse structures and George Harrison’s were more cognitively complex.

So: Ringo, then?

In Which Tom Friedman Cures Anemia

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 11:30:41 -0500

Read this column and you need never eat red meat again— that’s how much irony it contains.

“What do I mean by the Great Inflection? I mean something very big happened in the last decade.”

Beyonce had a baby? First African-American president? Whatever could it be?

In 2004, I wrote a book, called “The World Is Flat,” about how the world was getting digitally connected so more people could compete, connect and collaborate from anywhere.

Oh. That. Don’t remind me. But please, by all means, do go on to use the word ‘hyperconnectivity’ a whole bunch of times before saying something that will reveal a stunning lack of self-awareness:

That means the old average is over. Everyone who wants a job now must demonstrate how they can add value better than the new alternatives.

Well, almost everyone, apparently. Unless… Oh, were you not finished?

How to adapt? It will require more individual initiative. We know that it will be vital to have more of the “right” education than less, that you will need to develop skills that are complementary to technology rather than ones that can be easily replaced by it and that we need everyone to be innovating new products and services to employ the people who are being liberated from routine work by automation and software.

Hahahaha, “liberated”. Quick, someone, FREE TOM FRIEDMAN!

Meet The New GOP...

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 01:46:00 -0500

You know the old saying, if something is broken because it is fundamentally flawed at the level of its most basic assumptions, don’t fix it, just build another version of that thing? Yeah, neither did I until I read today’s column. But we learn so much!

Like, did you know that there are already ~~moderates~~ dudes within the Republican party, urging reform? People like Bobby Jindal, who want to exorcise the stupidity from our political discourse! People like Bill Kristol, the Dr. Frankenstein of the conservative movement! People like Charles Murray! Like Paul Ryan! (N.B. not included on this list would be David Brooks of last week, presumably.) This is actually a really smart way to make the Republican party seem moderate: build a second, even more extreme Republican party and then just stand to the left of it.

But David Brooks recognizes the most pressing question: now that the guys in suits have done the heavy lifting, “Who’s going to build a second G.O.P.?”

I don’t know, but I’m guessing they won’t be union.

The Great Mediocracy

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 04:38:25 -0500

David Brooks is makes the argument that meritocracy has failed. Basically there are too many smart people in New York City! (Though, probably one less than David Brooks thinks.) Also, raising taxes on rich people only gets poor households more benefits and “ease[s] suffering”, so yeah, we should totally cut that out, because it still won’t get David Brooks to move to South Dakota. (But, if there were a tax for that, I would totally pay it, no questions asked.)

The World Until Yesterday...

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 00:39:00 -0500

Was a world in which nobody was telling David Brooks to shut up.

Haha, just kidding, David Brooks obviously hears that like six times a day.

Anyway, David Brooks read a book— as he is wont to do; he is a person who teaches at YALE UNIVERSITY you guys*— and the lesson here is that David Brooks needs to go live in Papua New Guinea, because, you know, lately the tribesmen there have just been so emotionally distant, he just doesn’t even know who they are anymore.

Also, David Brooks is worried that our society is too impersonal. Ah, David, don’t worry— it’s about to get mad personal up in here.

*N.B. over my dead body will David Brooks be referred to as a ‘professor’.

We're baaaaaaack!

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 00:32:00 -0500

It’s January, I have insomnia, and the stars of cynicism have aligned perfectly for a resuscitation of S.U.D.B.

Special Guest Post!

Sat, 09 Jun 2012 07:51:04 -0400

(Today’s guest post is written by someone who works with Dan Ariely, or has at least seen a picture of him.)

I’m a historian kind of like David Brooks is a social psychologist, but there’s something fishy about today’s column on Dan Ariely’s new book:

“For the past several centuries, most Westerners would have identified themselves fundamentally as Depraved Sinners. In this construct, sin is something you fight like a recurring cancer — part of a daily battle against evil.”

Brooks is referring to Original Sin, which is the view that, ever since Adam and Eve screwed up, God looks at every human askance (God: the original racial profiler). Various strands of Christianity differ in their assessment of how justified God’s prejudice is, but few if any of them interpret this doctrine to mean that we’re irredeemable moral monsters. Mostly, original sin manifests as being tempted to misbehave here and there: stealing from the collection plate, lusting after the minister’s daughter. Catholic and Protestant doctrine is, in this sense, remarkably similar to the picture painted by Ariely. (Not including the Calvinists of course, because the Calvinists were hardcore.)

Theological considerations aside, Brooks completely misses the point here, which is that people would rather bend the rules in a self-serving manner than break them outright. This is because all of us, regardless of our view of human nature, are filled with the desire to act morally. This desire acts as a check on our less savory instincts, and can explain why we don’t usually cheat egregiously, even when we know there’s no chance of getting caught.

I’ll close on a philosophical note:

“You really shouldn’t shoot for goodness, which is so vague and forgiving. You should shoot for rectitude.”

So true. But are we to assume that David Brooks is taking his own advice? In which case, is his column the end product of David Brooks shooting for the stars? What would David Brooks half-assing it look like? How many pundits can dance on the head of a pin? (Answer: not as many as they’d have you believe.)

By: A Social Psychologist

A Strawman says what?

Tue, 22 May 2012 05:58:37 -0400

That’s a trick question, of course; strawmen can’t talk. Fortunately, they have David Brooks to speak for them. The NYT op-ed page: giving voice to disenfranchised strawmen since the dawn of time.

Today David Brooks asks the important question: why isn’t Obama as radical as, I dunno, Mitt Romney?

While American companies operate in radically different ways than they did 40 years ago, the sheltered, government-dominated sectors of the economy — especially education, health care and the welfare state — operate in astonishingly similar ways.

Follow-up question: remember when David Brooks wrote that alarmist column about Obama’s impending death panels? Yeah, me too.

The Obama campaign seems to be drifting willy-nilly into the opposite camp, arguing that the pressures brought to bear by the capital markets over the past few decades were not a good thing, offering no comparably sized agenda to reform the public sector.

C’mon already, Obama, we are all dying to see a plan for comprehensive healthcare reform. NO LITERALLY WE ARE ALL DYING FOR WANT OF HEALTHCARE. If only Obama had proposed something like that, oh, I don’t know, a few years ago? Republicans: the party of change. Unless that change was the idea of a Democrat and involved marginally higher (or just constant) tax rates for the top brackets, in which case, Republicans: the party of hyperbolic alarmist rhetoric and protracted litigation.

What has two thumbs and writes terrible columns?

Sun, 20 May 2012 05:54:00 -0400

Not Tom Friedman! No, Tom Friedman knows: bikini season is upon us! And in his quest for the perfect beach body, he’s growing increasingly desperate.

From ‘I’m not Mitt Romney,’ 4/10/12:

Sure, Ryan makes deep spending cuts to balance the budget in the long term. If I cut off both my thumbs, I’d also lose weight. But I’d also have a hard time getting another job.

From ‘Do you want the good news first,’ 5/20/12:

Maybe we could grow as a country without a plan. But we dare not cut without a plan. We can really do damage. I can lose weight quickly if I cut off both arms, but it will surely reduce my job prospects.

I wouldn’t say Tom Friedman has jumped the shark here so much as he has attempted to jump the shark, fallen short and landed on it, thereby crushing it to death, eaten the entire shark in one sitting, and then made himself throw up because he was feeling a little fat.

The blame game

Sat, 19 May 2012 07:32:00 -0400

David Brooks longs for a simpler time. A time when people hated themselves more, when governments were less transparent, and when a secret elite ruling class told people what to do rather than asking them what they wanted. Ah, the good old days! Nowadays Americans are like women: so damn demanding!

The Obama campaign issues its famous “Julia” ad, which perfectly embodies the vision of government as a national Sugar Daddy, delivering free money and goodies up and down the life cycle.

Seriously, people. If you want your government to buy you those Louboutins— or some other extraneous luxury good, like healthcare— you’d better start putting out:

Having lost a sense of their own frailty, many voters have come to regard their desires as entitlements. They become incensed when their leaders are not responsive to their needs… they command their politicians to give them benefits without asking them to pay.

Voters today: so damn spoiled! They’re all like, I want to put my 20k a year salary into an offshore Caribbean bank so I won’t have to pay any taxes on it, AND I want food stamps!

You know what was a great system for reining in the desires of the proletariat? Feudalism. Because, I mean, nothing to make you remember your frailty like working a fief in Louboutins.

WTF, man?

Tue, 15 May 2012 11:33:00 -0400

Noted social psychologist David Brooks is absolutely mystified as to why Obama isn’t losing this election. So he comes up with a theory:

Obama has displayed a kind of ESPN masculinity: postfeminist in his values, but also thoroughly traditional in style — hypercompetitive, restrained, not given to self-doubt, rarely self-indulgent.

You know when you’re in a fight with someone, and you try to make eye contact with them, but they manage to look sort of at you but avoid eye contact so that really they’re looking everywhere in the vicinity of your eyes, but not AT your eyes? To the point where, even as you’re annoyed by them you’re also a little impressed by how well they’re evading your eyes? Right, so in this metaphor, ‘someone’ = David Brooks, and ‘your eyes’ = Facts. And ‘Mitt Romney’ = the creepy puppet in the corner of the room that’s going to come to life after dark and go on a violent hair-cutting rampage.

Tom Friedman has no idea!

Sun, 13 May 2012 00:33:53 -0400

This is going to shock you, but: Tom Friedman does not know a lot of stuff. He did not know that Pete Rose would write an apology on a baseball and sell it to you! He did not know that novelists accept money for product placement! (But, being Tom Friedman, he cannot resist mentioning the fact that he does know a Harvard professor. Like, personally, you guys.)

Apparently he also does not know that Tom Friedman is the world’s biggest brand-name dropper (see: every Tom Friedman book, column). And that he wrote a book that was basically one long breathless “omggggggg markets!” (that synopsis makes it sound a lot more articulate than it is.) But hey, Tom Friedman is not one to let facts stand in the way of a good anecdote.