Tuesday, August 15, 2017

David Brooks Error Code 114: Attempt to Access Item Beyond Bounds of Memory




As some of you know, to save the company time, money and the hassle of endless, ennui-related workman's compensation claims, several years ago The New York Times replaced the columnist named David Brooks with a proprietary algorithm called ABRA CaDaBrA (Automated Bullshit Replication Algorith/Canned David Brooks Affectation) that extrudes David Brooks'-like word clusters.

Sadly the poor thing is starting to fail.  Bigly.  And routine diagnostics suggest it is due to some kind of catastrophic memory failure.

For instance, today's "column" --
How to Roll Back Fanaticism
contains sentences such as these --
Donald Trump is the perfect snake oil salesman for this moment...
He lacks inwardness... 
He has been escaping self-scrutiny his whole life and has become a genius at the self-exculpating rationalization. 
-- which, I will admit, have a certain inadvertent but undeniable entertainment value for the way they hang a big, bright lantern on Mr. Brooks' own comical lack of inwardness and his own, life-long mad dash to "escape self-scrutiny" and his own "genius at the self-exculpating rationalization" -- a moral failing on which Mr. Brooks has built his entire career.

But what should be troubling the New York Times' IT department is that, just seven days ago, ABRA CaDaBrA generated an entire column in which "Mr. Brooks" swore off writing about Donald Trump forever and ever.

Up until today, the "Make Up Some Soothing Bullshit About The Past" subroutine of the Fake David Brooks column generator has been used largely to create self-exculpating rationalizations for Mr. Brooks and his Conservative friends and Republican fellow travelers by inventing comforting fairy tales about long term trends and historical facts.    So clearly, something deeply FUBAR is going on with the Fake David Brooks' column generator now that it is "forgetting" the existence of something it "wrote" just a week ago.  

Other things that ABRA CaDaBrA "forgot" while compiling this column?

How to spell "Republican".

How to spell "Conservative".

How to spell "Congress".

How to spell "Voter".

How to spell "Voter Suppression".

How to spell "Fox News".

How to spell "Hate Radio."

And so forth.  It's a long list.

However there is also a bit of good news for The New York Times IT department.  Because even though the "Make Up Some Soothing Bullshit About The Past" subroutine is completely fucked,  the "Blame Everything On All Sides" module is functioning flawlessly.

For example, while we do get a fairly accurate laundry list of the seditious insanity perpetrated by the Trump Administration's menagerie conspiracy mongers and "pseudo-intellectuals" ...

...the reason these goons and madmen are in White House in the first place is attributed to the actions of some unnamed group of "people" (emphasis added throughout):
Many people live within a bewildering freedom... 
Anxiety is not so much a fear of a specific thing but a fear of everything, an unnamable dread about the future. People will do anything to escape it... 
Trump gave people...
Also because of the failure of "America":
I’m beginning to think the whole depressing spectacle of this moment — the Trump presidency and beyond — is caused by a breakdown of intellectual virtue, a breakdown in America’s ability to face evidence objectively, to pay due respect to reality, to deal with complex and unpleasant truths.
(Ed. Really? "beginning to think"?  America's Most Ubiquitous Conservative Public Intellectual is beginning to catch a hint of a whiff of a breeze of a notion that something might be wrong somewhere?  Well bully for you!)

And, finally, because we as a "country" have collectively let Mr. Brooks down:
The intellectual virtues may seem elitist, but once a country tolerates dishonesty, incuriosity and intellectual laziness, then everything else falls apart.
See?  Nary a Republican in sight.

But the real Turing Test for a machine-generated David Brooks column is this:  What sort of Beltway-pandering, sit-on-your-hands-and-call-it-courage-because-both-sides-are-awful "solution" will "Mr. Brooks" propose this time for a problem which "Mr. Brooks" adamantly refuses to identify by name?

And I gotta say, ABRA CaDaBrA passes this one with flying colors:
...
The temptation is simply to blast the neo-Nazis, the alt-right, the Trumpkins and the rest for being bigoted, vicious and hate-filled. And some of that is necessary. The boundaries of common decency have to be defined.

But throughout history the wiser minds have understood that anger and moral posturing are not a good antidote to rage and fanaticism. Competing vitriols only build on each other.

In fact, the most powerful answer to fanaticism is modesty...

Over the next few months I’m hoping to write several columns on why modesty and moderation are superior to the spiraling purity movements we see today. It seems like a good time for assertive modesty to take a stand.
Bravo, New York Times IT department!  This really is a flawless imitation of the original David Brooks.  The David Brooks whose reaction to his party's eight year campaign of vandalism, lies and sabotage leveled against the extraordinarily modest and moderate Barack Obama was despair...

...over The Extremes on Both Sides!

I suspect that every American president from Lincoln to Roosevelt who has had to commit American blood and treasure to the cause of defeating armies of racist fanatics who would rather die than compromise might have a few short and salty Anglo-Saxon words for Mr. Modest Louse before having him escorted swiftly from the White House.  Perhaps to the nearest drunk tank so he could sleep off whatever bad bottle he had run afoul of.

Needless to say, because of how gravely it interferes with the comforting Both Siderist bullshit Mr. Brooks' which employer pay him to sling, the inconvenient history of the actual country in which we all actually live has long since been been exiled to the zone Beyond the Bounds of Memory by both Mr. Brooks and the algorithm The New York Times built to emulate him.

Which is why any attempt to access items beyond the Bounds of Memory always leads to...difficulties.



5 comments:

trgahan said...

"....once a country tolerates dishonesty, incuriosity and intellectual laziness, then everything else falls apart."

But if "we" (aka. college educated, working professional conservative whites in need social-political absolution for their greed and fear) didn't do that, there would be no one to buy any of your books of faux-philosophy, simplistic thought, and bastardized theology.

Remember David, think tanks only buy enough copies for pulping to make a debut on the NYT Best Seller list, keeping it there is on you.

bowtiejack said...

So let me be sure I understand Mr. Brooks' deep deep thoughts.
"We" have let him down by electing Trump due to our deficient "modesty"?
Would that be in the same sense that the marks and victims of Trump University let Trump down by getting swindled?
Because it sure looks to me like a very talented and practiced con man saw the mewling herd of rubes Brooks & Co had assembled and just ran off with them as any good rustler would do.
I don't know how "modest" William of Ockham was, but his razor cuts through this bullshit pretty well.

dave said...

brooks is the guy on the titanic saying 'all will be well if we just all behave'.

meanwhile he is getting all the rich people on the lifeboats and saying i've got the steerage handled, they won't get anywhere near YOUR lifeboats...

proverbialleadballoon said...

_Once a Country Tolerates Dishonesty, Incuriosity and Intellectual Laziness, Then Everything Else Falls Apart: The Autobiography of David Brooks_

Unknown said...

It's called a S0C1 error.