The Graveyard of Both Siderism

Eventually, after his marriage collapsed, and after watching the political movement and party to which he had devoted his life fall apart, and after smoking enough shitty crank from a pipe made from the skull of Edmund Burke, it was inevitable that Mr. David Brooks of the New York Times -- the Pope of the high and holy Church of Both Siderism -- would eventually wind up in the Laplace's demon-haunted graveyard of all false equivalences:  hard determinism.

Where nothing can truly be considered anyone's fault, because the choices we make are not choices at all, but the inevitable byproducts of vast forces beyond our perception and control.

Think I'm kidding?

Does Decision-Making Matter?

David Brooks NOV. 25, 2016

This is followed a nine paragraph book report of this type:

Danny Kahneman grew up Jewish in occupied France during World War II. Once in Paris, after curfew, he was nearly captured by an SS officer...

Amos Twersky was born in Israel, to a mother who ignored him for long periods so she could serve the nation...

Which is followed by...

We don’t decide about life; we’re captured by life. In the major spheres, decision-making, when it happens at all, is downstream from curiosity and engagement. If we really want to understand and shape behavior, maybe we should look less at decision-making and more at curiosity. Why are you interested in the things you are interested in? Why are some people zealously seized, manically attentive and compulsively engaged?

Nothing reeks harder of cosseted privilege than advice on the true nature of decision-making as handed down to the impoverished and desperate masses by a man who made his fortune trafficking in fairy tales for deluded plutocrats.

A man who has never had to just suck it up and take shitty jobs just to make ends meet.   

A man whose life's work has helped crater our democracy and birth a mob of bigots and imbeciles who are, most definitely, zealously seized, manically attentive and compulsively engaged in the Conservative project  to make American great again by burning this fucker down and dancing raving and naked in the fire light.

Updates:

Yastreblyansky once again shows how to bring a gun to a gunfight:

Book report time from David Brooks ("Does Decision Making Matter?"), on Michael Lewis's The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds about the story of the collaboration between Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the founders of behavioral economics, a book not yet released (it comes out December 6), so I can't tell you whether there's any evidence he's read beyond page 40, or how much the column plagiarizes it, or that kind of thing.

I can tell you Brooks spells Tversky's name wrong ("Twersky", 11 times), an error no editor has caught, though he's spelled it correctly in five columns since 2006...