A bumper sticker I saw on a car in a supposedly liberal college town:
An email a reader who is trying to kill me:
CLICKING ON THIS LINK will COMPLETE YOU and MAKE YOU WHOLE
Get ready to take an AMAZING JOURNEY with DAVID BROOKS as he pontificates about his magnum opus THE SOCIAL ANIMAL for an ENTIRE HOUR (ok, 53 glorious fucking minutes and change to be precise) with the undisputed king of boot-licking, ass-kissing interviewers CHARLIE ROSE.
Consider this an open thread.
Update. You can now write a review of Bobo’s book if you wish.
Corner Stone
Since it’s an open thread, “How you doing?”
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
I figured you were in Brooksville, trolling for chuckles. We had hundreds noisy protesters at the State of the state (dismal, tending to dangerous, in reality) speech by Napoleon Heartland(TM) and no word on whether the AOS sent a flower arrangement in sympathy.
beltane
I was putting on a Thomas the Tank Engine DVD for my son this afternoon when I spotted Bobo on Charlie Rose. Again. Is he on that show every day now?
Bob Loblaw
Oh you never know. That car could just be owned by a hipster in a wool cap and an REO Speedwagon t-shirt. Next time check the front seat for empty PBR cans to make sure.
beltane
Duh. I should have clicked the link. I can’t edit my comment for some reason.
Bet the dude with the John Galt for president sticker always wonders why he’s forced to live a celibate life.
schrodinger's cat
I just don’t get Bobo’s appeal, he is not particularly bright or good looking and has an annoying voice, so why is he on my TV and in my newspaper spewing banal drivel.
schrodinger's cat
Who or what is this hipster that I keep hearing about
MikeJ
@beltane: All the sex scenes in Rand books non-consensual. He just hasn’t found the right girl to settle down with and rape.
Restrung
@schrodinger’s cat:
asked and answered?
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
I found myself having to explain to my fairly liberal sister, who is married to a bona-fide conservative and sort-of-kind-of likes and respects David Brooks, why my husband and I do NOT.
It was a Masterpiece Theater of tact and careful word choosing, I assure you.
General Stuck
I’m not clicking that fucking link, fifty bucks might get me to, but not a cent less.
schrodinger's cat
@Restrung: Don’t tell me, Bobo is a hipster?
beltane
@schrodinger’s cat: Because he passes as a deep thinker among our not-too-bright, not-very-good looking, annoying-voiced media.
Wiesman
This will make you feel better, Cole.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-yHSaP0Dyg&feature=player_embedded
Poopyman
@schrodinger’s cat: That description applies to 99% of the hipsters on Sunday morning bobblehead shows. One old ex–presidential candidate being the main culprit.
Must be that TV ages you and makes you idiotic.
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
@Wiesman: (I think it’s actually Doug. Unless they’re tooooootally messing with us. Which I would not put past them).
Hunter Gathers
Galt’s first act as President will be a mandatory screening, at gunpoint, of parts 1, 2 and 3 of the Atlas Shrugged films (assuming the producers come up with the $1.75 to complete parts 2 and 3).
Wiesman
@Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther:
Oooops, sorry Doug. Back to lurking…
beltane
When will Tom Friedman’s novel be coming out?
Restrung
@schrodinger’s cat:
Nahh, your statement was a question followed by a question that was a statement. I might have that backwards. ?
piratedan
@beltane: deep as in his thoughts sound better from the bottom of a well or deep as in the amount of mental anguish you put yourself through realizing that this man has a college education and apparently didn’t learn anything?
Mouse Tolliver
Just turned on Lawrence O’Donnell. Bobo Brooks is on telling us who we want to be president in 2012. Last time I turned on O’Donnell Ann Coulter was on. This is why I generally don’t make a point of tuning in to the Last Word. And they’ve got Charlie Sheen on CNN talking about tiger’s blood. Suddenly I feel like I’m Albert Brooks in Broadcast News. Somewhere Holly Hunter is having a good cry.
Steeplejack
Doug Hill:
Amen to that. Brr! That’s a cold shot.
Suffern ACE
I’m not one to shy away from tut tutting this current batch of hipsters, but I don’t think it is fair to lump them in with the bobbleheads. The bobbleheads are hepcats at best.
Zam
Just what I want in a President, someone who’s name is synonymous with running away and hiding when faced with difficulties…
Mike in NC
A while back I noticed a VW sedan in the parking lot at work that was plastered with NRA and Tea Party bumper stickers. One was yellow and had the teabagger rattlesnake and read, “I’m the revolutionary warrior your hippie friends warned you about”. One day I saw the driver get out of the car: a scowling, shaved headed oaf about 6’5″ wearing cowboy boots. I wanted to try to catch up to the asshole and ask him WTF that even meant.
RSA
From one of the Amazon reviews:
Great, Brooks is impressing readers with forty-year-old findings in linguistics (Berlin and Kay, 1969).
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
@Wiesman: Come back, little Sheeba!
beltane
@Mouse Tolliver: OMG! Bobo is metastasizing!
Someone here recommended Wolf Hall to me a few weeks ago and I must say I’m enjoying it very much. Top rate historical fiction; David Brooks should read it.
Hann1bal
I made a preemptive strike on Bobo at Goodreads. I don’t really do Amazon, aside from having fun with tags, sometimes.
Hann1bal
@RSA: “Recent” is in the eye of the Boboholder.
Chris
“A supposedly liberal college town” – someone should grab that blogspot address.
BGinCHI
@beltane: If you mention Wolf Hall and David Brooks in the same sentence again I’m gonna have to go Medieval on you.
BGinCHI
@Chris: Prolly Ithaca and almost certainly a joke.
Although maybe it was Dominick LaCapra and he’s finally lost his mind.
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: Several solutions to the David Brooks problem could be gleaned from a reading of Wolf Hall.
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: Common law remedies.
Brooks was on Lawrence O’Donnell’s show tonight and I was floored. I tried to watch but it was just too fucking unbelievable.
Emperor.Has.No.Clothes.
Lev
Libertarians aren’t uncommon on college campuses. I think I knew more of them in college than I knew regular conservative Republicans. I can only think of two of the latter from those days, one of whom later recanted.
Matter of fact, I flirted with that ideology a bit during my university days. Sophomore year, specifically. Don’t underestimate the appeal of an ideology that reduces the complex world to a small set of explainable phenomena and simple rules. But it requires an extraordinary amount of confidence in things that don’t exactly merit it, and a lot of skepticism of things that are obviously workable in this and other countries. In other words, it’s a perfect ideology for a collegian with no life experience.
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: The mere suggestion of an unclothed David Brooks provokes shudders of dread. I imagine his wife feels the same way.
Sasha
That reminds me, I need to find a copy of ATLAS SHRUGGED to read for Lent. I’ve decided that mere physical mortification isn’t enough.
Martin
Huh. The bumper stickers in this supposedly liberal college town want Voldemort for President. Didn’t we already have John Galt for President and Voldemort for VP from 2001 until 2009?
WarMunchkin
Have you considered the possibility of that driver being really good at trolling?
Martin
@Lev:
So did every other sophomore in the history of American higher education. After a year of pot + kegs + impulsive sex, libertarianism suddenly seems to make a lot of sense. Then after that first semester of D’s you come to your senses. I’ve become convinced that every libertarian flunked out of college first semester of sophomore year – they simply missed the rebound.
Martin
@WarMunchkin: Doug merely failed to mention that it was his car.
Mark S.
Apparently, this is all David Brooks is going to talk about from now on:
These complex events can now be explained by a book about fictional yuppies Harold and Erica.
Wha? What the hell is he talking about? I’ve never heard anyone distinguish the French and British Enlightenments that way.
No, stupid people like you define human worth that way. And you still do that, because your protagonists were Davos vacationing Masters of the Universe.
Again, Bobo, you and the assholes you hang around with are constantly desiring money and power. Normal people desire other things in life, like love and meaning. These desires do not all spring from the unconscious; your just such a shallow person you’ve never realized that you wanted them as well.
Tim
Until proven otherwise, I’m going to assume this is a gag. so, +1 to WarMunchkin.
asiangrrlMN
@Martin: Win.
I’m giving up swearing for Lent in preparation for my run to the Republican primaries. Fortunately, I can continue to lie.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
.
I don’t understand why the Commander in Chief of the United States military is making President Obama torture Bradley Manning.
.
.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mark S.: I’ve been to Davos. The skiing is good, but it is a pretty shit place for an apres. A friend and I bounced from bar to bar and club to club until we finally were walking past a little rundown place and heard Golden Earring’s Radar Love. It was the only decent bar in the town.
Kryptik
Well, we already have a nation that’s fully convinced their barbers are literally smarter and more worldly than a college prof. and that you learn more from Dr. Phil than Econ 101, so why should we expect any different from random bumper stickers even in college towns?
BGinCHI
@Uncle Clarence Thomas:
There, fixed.
Elizabelle
@Sasha:
This made me laugh. Thanks.
trollhattan
@beltane:
In six months. I understand it’s a soft pr0n book, working title: “Tom’s Unit”
BGinCHI
@trollhattan: Close.
It is soft porn, but it’s still called “Hot, Flat, and Crowded.”
AnotherBruce
I haven’t heard from Friedman lately. Has he said anything stupid recently?
AnotherBruce
Never mind, I should read the thread before commenting. Tom’s writing a book called F.U.
asiangrrlMN
@trollhattan: @BGinCHI:
Ew, and ew. Not what I needed to read right before going to bed. If I have nightmares about Friedman’s unit, I’m blaming you two.
Night, all.
Anne Laurie
@Martin:
Oooh, that’s so good, I’mma gonna hafta steal it!
Not me, she said proudly. And when my fellow wet little geeks asked how I could resist The Clarity, I told them I’d spent my formative years under the tutelage of Dominican nuns, and it’s a scienterrific fact that smallpox survivors are immune to cowpox.
(Okay, I flirted with lesbian separatism during my freshman year, but I was officially banned for insufficient seriousness. Probably for much the same reasons.)
jl
If Wobbly DougJ Hill is close the edge, some one tell him that, it being a liberal college town and all, full of snide elitist liberals, that the license plate might be snark.
And DougJ is close the edge, unfortunately. I commented yesterday that DougJ Hill had obviously fallen in love with Brooks’ fictional Erica, and behold, he disappeared for a day. A tell, I tell you.
Cain
@WaterGirl – hey responding to your last message on that open thread from yesterday.. it was tough dealing with him missing… I think I get emotional pretty much everyday even now. Usually, its when I’m coming home.. because that’s the time I look forward to seeing the two of them. This new kitty that now waits outside our door when I pull up will make someone a great pet. She cries for attention, not so much food and will sit in your lap if you allow her to. It took us about a week or so to get her comfortable to be around her.
My wife is already scheming to adopt her.. hah. I’ll post a picture soon.. she’s adorable.. I hope someone can tell me what kind of cat she is. She’s definitely a long hair (unfortunately) My remaining pet,a female is either hostile or indifferent to her. Mostly indifferent.
cain
Cain
@AnotherBruce:
I think on groundhog day it was pronounced he won’t open up his yap till spring.
cain
TenguPhule
When I think of the trees that have died for Brooks sins, I want to cry.
Yutsano
@Cain:
Dude, just admit you’ve been adopted and take the damn cat in. She chose you guys for a reason, and I’m guessing it’s not the tuna supply.
Hovercraft Full of Eels
The contents of Charlie Rose’s briefcase:
1) Address book with contact info for a bunch of rich white guys
2) Calendar, to record times and dates of important cocktail parties
3) Chapstick
4) Knee pads
5) Hand towel, to wipe up any liquid and/or semi-gelatinous emissions resulting from the use of #3 and #4
6) Mouthwash, for gargling afterwards
ImJohnGalt
Goddamn that piece “Union Myths” by Thomas Sowell is making its way through the idiocrasphere.
sacman701
@Lev:
I agree, most liberal college towns have a lot of libertarians. They don’t have a lot of social conservatives.
Mnemosyne
@Cain:
After our cat Natasha died, G was really, really reluctant to get another one — she had been his little pal for six years and he didn’t want to replace her. Then Keaton picked me to go home with (literally — he reached out of his cage and grabbed my arm) and we were unable to resist Fate. Even so, the day we took him home, G looked at Keaton and said, “Damn it, you’re going to break our hearts one day like Tashi did.”
Keaton couldn’t replace Natasha, just like Annie and Charlotte can’t replace Boris (who was my boy for 12 years and now I’m tearing up, damn it), but they made a place for themselves anyway.
SRW1
@Mark S.:
OK fine, but you’re not developing the right reaction to this. The right reaction is to conclude that this Bobo dude must be a really deep thinker, well above your own pay grade, actually. Instead of considering him a bit of a hair slitter where there are ho hair, there is this horrifying thought of you just not getting all his subtleties. How would YOU cope with that thought as an interviewer, if you felt a bit on thin ice there? By making sure that you’re not being found out and therefore treading carefully there, maybe?
WaterGirl
@Cain: If your wife is scheming to adopt her and you think she’s adorable, this may end up like my cocker spaniel story after all. With my kitty soulmate, I didn’t stop crying every day until I got my two new kitties. Now I miss my sweet boy, but at least I have two kitties to love, and I am not crying every day. Nobody knows what’s right for you but you. I will stay tuned.
Triassic Sands
I was just looking at Krugman’s blog and following a link I discovered that Megan McGarbled [sic] writes one of the 25 best financial blogs. How is that even possible? (Krugman ranks #1)
ppcli
@Mark S.:
Insomniac jottings, too late to actually look anything up, but this is OK. I’m not used to seeing reference to the “British” Enlightenment, thereby assimilating the quite distinct the Scottish Enlightenment. But maybe Brooks is reading someone who likes to clump Gibbon and Butler in with Hume and Adam Smith. I can’t think offhand of anyone who distinguishes the “enlightenment” of those four guys from, say, Voltaire or the encyclopedists that way. (Rousseau is a whole other story.) But it’s not a crazy thing to suggest (at least for the last three). Probably someone has done it.
Ailuridae
Quick whine:
My DVR failed to record Lights Out tonight which is irritating. When I went to pirate bay the only have the first four episodes which is more irritating as they are on episode 9. So now I have to wait for tomorrow night to watch it as the episode is not on fancast, on demand, hulu or FX itself and I am too unskilled at torrent fu.
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
Many years ago I noticed that the chief benefit of being a grown-up was that I no longer banged my head into things as often as I did when I was a child. Just now I realized that as I have grown older still and retired from pick-up basketball I no longer have to adjust to a new bent-up configuration for my glasses.
Always moving towards less and less head trauma. Very satisfying.
Hovercraft Full of Eels
@Ailuridae: You might want to have a look here: http://www.bt-chat.com/details.php?id=117024&hit=1
Yutsano
@Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel): Is there a purpose behind this self reflection that I r not grokking?
MikeJ
@Omnes Omnibus:
Meh. I learned to ski in the western US. Ice doesn’t do anything for me. If the powder isn’t above my waist so I can feel like I’m flying as my skis float off the hard pack and up toward the surface, I’m not really interested.
Honestly, a few days on the pistes in yurp are more than I’ll ever need.
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
@Yutsano: None whatsoever. Simplement une pensée petite.
Yutsano
@MikeJ:
Go three hours north and it’s like being in Europe without the long plane ride and airport hassles.
@Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel): D’accord.
MikeJ
@Yutsano: Icy ski runs liberally coated in Germans?
Mark S.
@ppcli:
The distinction I’ve most often read is that British philosophy was more empirical (Locke and Hume), while Continental was more rationalist (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz). Inductive vs. Deductive. I suppose I could see an argument along the lines of the empiricists were better at appreciating how much of our minds are built on social interactions.
I think the Enlightenment was much more about reason vs. faith, with pretty much everyone except Rousseau on the side of reason.
Yutsano
@MikeJ: Probably more powdery, though with all the damn rain Whistler could be a total sheet by now. Better health care. Also.
Ailuridae
@Hovercraft Full of Eels:
Danke!
bob h
It would be wonderful if Brooks got so enamored of book writing that he decides to give up his NYT, PBS, NPR gigs and gets the hell out of our lives.
maskling
charlie rose: the lawrence welk of interviewers.
TheMightyTrowel
@BGinCHI: Go Tudor. More gout.
jaleh
I just read (tried) Brooks’s piece in NYT.
I always look at the comments(obviously!). This is the most recommended comment:
“This column is all about you, isn’t it, Mr. Brooks?
The misapprehensions under which you suggest “we” suffer seem to be those that commenters have pointed out pervade your faulty analyses. If you’d read the comments to your columns, you’d see that your readers don’t suffer from the same blind spots and foibles. We’ve been “in touch” with the broader societal problems for a long time. We don’t suffer from a separation of reason & emotion; in fact, many of us employ both when trying to explain to you the errors in your analyses. We may use statistics to back up or amplify our arguments, but we don’t live and breathe them. They’re useful, they’re often illuminating, but they are not the be-all and end-all.
You’ve suggested that social scientists have recently made the brilliant discovery that there’s more to life than raw data points. No, the science and philosophy have been out there all along. It may be that you chose to ignore the vast bodies of social, philosophical, political and psychological literature because it didn’t fit YOUR narrow understanding of how the world works. But most of the rest of us have not been so blighted and benighted. We got it, we get it, and we’ve been sharing it right here on the virtual pages of the New York Times.
We are delighted you are undergoing some soul-searching or possibly some therapy. But, please, don’t try to wrap the rest of us in your own cloth. Our suits, varied though they are, are of richer materials. We’re way ahead of you. Good luck.”
go over there and recommend it !!
jaleh
I just read (tried) Brooks’s piece in NYT.
I always look at the comments(obviously!). This is the most recommended comment:
“This column is all about you, isn’t it, Mr. Brooks?
The misapprehensions under which you suggest “we” suffer seem to be those that commenters have pointed out pervade your faulty analyses. If you’d read the comments to your columns, you’d see that your readers don’t suffer from the same blind spots and foibles. We’ve been “in touch” with the broader societal problems for a long time. We don’t suffer from a separation of reason & emotion; in fact, many of us employ both when trying to explain to you the errors in your analyses. We may use statistics to back up or amplify our arguments, but we don’t live and breathe them. They’re useful, they’re often illuminating, but they are not the be-all and end-all.
You’ve suggested that social scientists have recently made the brilliant discovery that there’s more to life than raw data points. No, the science and philosophy have been out there all along. It may be that you chose to ignore the vast bodies of social, philosophical, political and psychological literature because it didn’t fit YOUR narrow understanding of how the world works. But most of the rest of us have not been so blighted and benighted. We got it, we get it, and we’ve been sharing it right here on the virtual pages of the New York Times.
We are delighted you are undergoing some soul-searching or possibly some therapy. But, please, don’t try to wrap the rest of us in your own cloth. Our suits, varied though they are, are of richer materials. We’re way ahead of you. Good luck.”
Josh Gooch
All right, I’ve lurked here for a long time, but I have to comment since I work with some of this “British” stuff. Brooks’s distinction between “British” and “French” enlightenment is conservative code: he wants to bash some form of imagined romantic individualism that he associates with the French enlightenment by essentially positing the importance of a neoconservative appropriation of utilitarianism. That is in and of itself hilarious given the history of utilitarianism as a reform philosophy, but entirely sensible when you think of it as a return to the Poor Laws, austerity, and imprisonment for debt. Hooray for American conservatives! But Brooks knows the usual threadbare claptrap isn’t going to work, so he’s gone back to the well of eighteenth-century political philosophy. If I recall, he’s done this before, and essentially lifted sections from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (and probably Hume, ’cause why not?), and grafted them to trite contemporary work in cognitive theory. What’s the benefit of this weird appropriation? Well, it undermines the kinds of criticism that Adam Smith made about market society and the worship of wealth by turning it into a natural social sentiment (hence evolutionary/cognitive theory). After all, you can’t have a conservative picking up a book by Adam Smith and reading that “the disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.” Those kinds of statements undermine all of the invisible hand worship of the contemporary conservative movement.
Evinfuilt
@Lev: That was me, and some people wonder how i changed so much. I grew up, I wish the others did.
HyperIon
DougJ wrote:
this needs to be said more often.
Studly Pantload
Seems appropo for the day (and times): A quote for the inimitable Oscar Wilde:
“By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.”