Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times has officially used up your team's entire allocation of myopic, cossetted self-pity for the month of September.
Today, the world feels like a hostile environment to. … well … everyone. I had assumed that as society got more equal we would all share a measure of equal dignity. But it turns out that without an obvious social hierarchy we all get to feel equally powerless.
Also, as the tide of the Trumpocalypse closes in, more volunteers are urgently needed to sandbag the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It.
Group victimization has become the global religion — from Berkeley to the alt-right to Iran — and everybody gets to assert his or her victimization is worst and it’s the other people who are the elites.
Because Mr. Brooks can't do this shit all by himself people! Although lord knows he tries.
Today rage and singularity is the approved woke response to the world — Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders.
Mr. Brook concludes:
But you show me a person who can gracefully balance six fervent and unexpectedly diverse commitments, and that will be the one who is ready to lead in this new world.
You know what, Mr. Brooks? I'll show you just such a person.
He led this country for eight years though some of the worse calamities in modern American history, And every single day he was president your Republican party did everything within their power to slander him and sabotage his efforts.
Then your Republican party found a lying, racist, thug who was Barack Obama's evil mirror-opposite in every way imaginable, nominated him and elected him to the highest office in the land. Because fuck you, Libtards!
And using the mighty power of that office, with a Republican-controlled congress at his back, President Stupid has literally done nothing but stoke the rage and racist of his base, lie constantly about everything, and try to roll back every one of Barack Obama's accomplishment, no matter how trivial.
And the base of your Republican party love him for it.
Eight years of trying to appease and play nice with your Republican party during the Clinton Administration got this country eight years of Bush Administration failure and ruin.
Eight years of begging for cooperation and compromise from your Republican party -- of pretending your Republican partywas anything other than a radical outlier party of seditious goons and con men -- got this country the Maladministration of President Stupid.
Our nation is not is existential danger trouble because of big, bland, everybody-is-equally-wrong globs of atomized monads that can somehow only be overcome if we all agree to never judge people like Mr. David Brooks for the evil they have done:
We live in an atomized, individualistic society in which most people have competing identities...We are in terrible trouble because of a distinctly identifiable group of racist morons.
The second step is to refuse to be a monad...
A group whose rage and malignant ignorance has been carefully honed and weaponized by your Republican party, and who currently have a knife to the throat of our democracy.
So once again, fuck you, Mr. Brooks.
Meanwhile, a glimpse of what Hell's Green Room looks like:
Fascinating @samharrisorg conversation with @nytdavidbrooks about the architecture of character and how we grow https://t.co/GJmpl2aSVH
— Maria Popova (@brainpicker) September 1, 2017
Behold, a Tip Jar!
9 comments:
mistuh brooks always calls for healing, for working across the aisle. when he says that this quisling attitude is the perfect enabler to our present plight the healing will begin. but that will be never.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDAmPIq29ro
Thanks. You've made my day better. (Also Soundwaves 10@10 just started playing "I Will Survive.")
I note that Mr. B. wrote "without an obvious social hierarchy we all get to feel equally powerless."which reminded me of a character in one of Suzy McKee Charnas' Motherlines, I think, [paraphrased] who could not figure out who (in a largely egalitarian group) she needed to suck up to, that being the only relationship she understood. Perhaps that is the only relationship Mr. B understands.
The only "Group victimization" I see in this article is upper middle and upper class white professional/executive class males whining that Trump and his army of nitwits fucking up their tax cuts and letting liberal neighbors, co-workers, and cocktail party guests make fun of them to their faces.
BTW. A few protestors, however violent, in Berkeley does not equal riot gear clad, sharpened shield, club swinging Nazis beating a bystander while cops look on indifferently, does not equal the nation state of Iran, which for all its faults, has to deal with the most power nation on the plant trying to destroy it for the last 30 years.
I like this passage:
"Today, the world feels like a hostile environment to. … well … everyone. I had assumed that as society got more equal we would all share a measure of equal dignity. But it turns out that without an obvious social hierarchy we all get to feel equally powerless."
What? Things are more equal today? On what planet does this guy live? By all measures, social inequality is worse today nationally than it was fifty years ago.
No "obvious social hierarchy"? What is he talking about? People like financial criminal Mnuchin and his wife are virtually sucking the blood out of impoverished babies, but Brooks doesn't what to acknowledge that.
I think Bobo is afraid of himself and his friends being taxed a bit so that we can fix our society. He doesn't care about anyone's well-being but that of the rich and their sycophantic hangers-on like himself.
Brooks: "White males and Zionists feel victimized on campus. Christians feel oppressed by the courts."
Oh, please.
Eight years of trying to appease and play nice with your Republican party during the Clinton Administration got this country eight years of Bush Administration failure and ruin.
I wouldn't say eight years. One year was all it needed -- specifically, one year of Al Gore trying to run on Bill Clinton's record and away from Bill Clinton's self at the same time, in a hilariously doomed attempt to make The Liberal Press and The Press Not So Liberal and The Press Reactionary stop straining at his gnats and swallowing W.'s camels.
("When the Democratic candidate allows himself to be put on the defensive and starts apologizing for the New Deal and the Fair Deal, and says he really doesn't believe in them, he is sure to lose. The people don't want a phony Democrat. If it's a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat..." -- Harry S Truman, speech at an Americans for Democratic Action banquet, May 1952)
Eight years of begging for cooperation and compromise from your Republican party -- of pretending your Republican partywas anything other than a radical outlier party of seditious goons and con men -- got this country the Maladministration of President Stupid.
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had faith in the ability of the American people to see Republican obstruction for what it was. I like to think they were right about the American people, but they were dead-ass wrong about that infinitely programmable Repugnican base about whom you've written ad vomitam in this space. (If a tree falls in the woods and Fox News doesn't cover it, does it make a sound? Not that a Strom Thurmond Republican can hear, certainly.)
"Today, the world feels like a hostile environment to. … well … everyone."
Oh fuck you in your nose, David. This hostile environment you whinge over, is it perhaps a new phenomenon to you and your friends?
Well, with a few exceptions for the attempts at policy Fergus has flailed at, "the world" doesn't seem much more hostile to me and my friends at all. As a matter of fact, there are noticeably fewer gun fights in the street outside my house now than there were several years ago.
I don't sense any lack of obvious social hierarchy down here at the ground level of the economy, so perhaps you are falling "victim" to Sully's edict about cleaning up your own goddamn mess before mucking around in anyone else's?
Because, really, that's about the only way that shit makes any sense at all.
-Doug in Oakland
The thumping DFB’s recent Ex also has a competing identity, with the younger, hotter nubile wife.
1) "without an obvious social hierarchy we all get to feel equally powerless." Dafuq?? There's no social hierarchy anymore??
2) "feeling like" you're being oppressed isn't actually that same as "being" oppressed. But whatevs
You'd think this shit would be obvious to Brooks... yeah, you'd think ...
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