Today’s BoBo column is useful, very useful indeed.
It’s one of his nominally apolitical efforts, and as such, parsing its intellectual flaws and frauds yields a helpful guide to the ways Brooks puts his thumb on the scale of everything he writes. A column like this one helps expose his genius for bullshit without the confusing (to some) aura of partisan argument.
Brooks here presents what seems to be a humble (sic) precis of responses he received to questions posed in an earlier column in an exercise of what he termed “crowd sourced sociology.”
That Brooks might not be the best suited to launch such an effort could be seen in the first of those queries:
A generation after the feminist revolution, are women still, on average, less confident than men?
Someone with some methodological insight might see the problem in the way that question is phrased…and I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
But it’s really today’s column that captures BoBo’s skill of finding always and only the conclusion he seeks in any alleged analysis of the alleged data. His key trick: there’s always a turn, a sudden shift in the unstated assumptions of the piece that allows Brooks to assert a claim unsupported by the actual body of information he possesses. Let’s see that in action here, from this beginning
I’ve read through a mountain of responses, and my first reaction is awe at the diversity of the human experience. I went looking for patterns in this survey…
But it was really hard to see consistent correlations and trends. The essays were highly idiosyncratic, and I don’t want to impose a false order on them that isn’t there.
Fair enough.
But wait! It’s BoBo, after all. Who needs an understanding of the data when there’s an anecdote that dovetails with his preconceptions:
One of the calmest letters came from Carol Collier, who works at Covenant College.
One of the drums BoBo has been banging lately is the (in his view) value of acceptance of a body of received belief. He’s been writing about modern Jewish orthodoxy, but he’s asserted more than once the importance of revealed religion as a source of stable selves. So it’s no surprise what kind of reader would win his accolade:
She wrote: “As a believer in Jesus Christ, I see myself as redeemed, forgiven and covered in the righteousness of Jesus Christ. I believe that this is how God sees me, all the time and without exception. I believe that his smile and delight in me is unwavering. This view of myself is quite simple yet with profound implications. It allows me to accept criticism without self-condemnation and to accept affirmations without exalting myself. This is the ideal view of myself that I am always working at. It is a struggle, but a good one.”
Just to be clear, my issue isn’t with Ms. Collier; she believes what she believes and she feels what she feels, and, as T. J. Luhrman has been writing a lot lately, that experience is itself both a subjective reality and a data point.
No, what gets my goat is the all-too-predictable-use Brooks makes of Collier’s account:
I’ll try to harvest more social trends later.
Say what!? (BTW — there is no ellipsis there. That sentence follows directly from the quote.)
Let’s review. At the top of his column Brooks tells us that “it was really hard to see consistent correlations and trends.” Now, we learn that not only has he shown us (at least) one trend, there will be more to come! Impressive.
So what is this trend? Bobo reveals his discovery:
But, in the meantime, I’m struck by how hard it is to have the right stable mix of self-confidence and self-criticism without some external moral framework or publicly defined life calling.
D’0h. Of course — BoBo’s Kulturkampf never rests. We need to behave properly, as our faith teaches us, as the manners of our mythical ancestors would have us, as the non-sexually-abusing members of Brooklyn Orthodox communities may be claimed to act.
A confession, here. Remember how I said above that this was an apolitical column. There is actually no such thing in Brooks’ repertory. It’s all political, which is why he creates his cultural and sociological fictions. This column is a foundational one, a way to slip in a claim of reality — that enjoying a good life, possessing the crucial human skills of balance, depend on specific allegiances that Brooks can then assert must inform whatever specific political claim he wants to make.
Another thing: Brooks offers in this pair of columns — the questionnaire and now this “results” piece — a veneer of science-yness, the trappings of surveys and analysis that (he suggests) give his interpretations the disinterested authority of a mere reporter of fact. What you actually see here, of course, is that Brooks either has no clue what goes into the construction of an observation or experiment a scientist would recognize as meaningful — or he does, but doesn’t care. Let’s go to his conclusion to see that dishonesty in full flower:
If it’s just self-appraisal — one piece of your unstable self judging another unstable piece — it’s subjectivity all the way down.
So. To review again. BoBo says there are no trends or patterns he can see in his responses. He then quotes a single reply and asserts that it captures one fact — presumably that of the connection of religious commitment to the possession of certain qualities of personality. And then he states, with no reference to any of his data, (ex cathedra, as it were) that another way of knowing one’s self is invalid.
The scientific follies are so many, and so many of them are obvious, it’s exhausting to try and list them all. Just to suggest one — no where does BoBo suggest that he might have to deal with a selection bias in the population of his readers who choose to reply to him. Given that he’s written often about the satisfactions of an externally constrained religious life, that might be a problem — but it is not one that seems to trouble him.
But the fact that his “study” is worthless as actual knowledge is both obvious and besides the point, his point. Look one more time at that last sentence. Notice the double sleight of hand there?
It’s not just the untethered nature of the assertion — our David telling us that self appraisal is suspect — but this too: it’s an answer to a question no one asked.* He began by wondering how men and women compare for self-confidence; now he’s shifted to an assertion about the sources of his respondents self-judgment. Not the same question at all. (There’s the added problem of the subjectivity of religious experience as well, but to ask BoBo to do the very hard work of thinking about about that is like asking a donkey to keep watch for angels. It’s been reported to happen, but very, very rarely.) All of his column is unconnected to this final point; it’s there just for atmosphere, to give this unsupported, culturally and politically freighted claim the aura of reality. It’s pure propaganda. This is David Brooks.
Enough. I’ve wasted another perfectly good hour foaming at Brooks many sins. Here’s the shorter: he always plays a rigged game. The only reason to read him is to play “spot the bullshit.”
To add: what bugs me from my particular bailiwick as a science writer is that he has so little knowledge of, or perhaps respect for, what actually goes into the very hard work of deriving actual understanding from the exceptional complexity of material reality — including the extraordinary tangle of human experience. There are lots of way science is losing some of its cultural capital right now, some self-inflicted. But nonsense like this sure doesn’t help.
Image: Lucas Cranach the Elder, Portraits of Henry the Pious, Duke of Saxony and his wife Katharina von Mecklenburg, 1514.
Mandalay
Yet another “bobo” FP? However valid your comments and analysis might be, there is a whole world out there. Does he really merit this much attention?
gogol's wife
He’s highly influential so he needs to be ridiculed at every opportunity.
Villago Delenda Est
What have we done to not get the meteor on top of this idiot’s head that is so richly deserved?
Is there something we can do to change this? Sacrifice a virgin or something?
scav
He’s making his taxi-driver anecdotes come to him! Bet he doesn’t tip, either.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Shorter Bobo: The Children of the Corn are my friends, and look what a nice, orderly town they have, too! A rich man could settle here and put down some roots.
BGinCHI
Analogy:
You are a member of a star ship crew being sent out to explore deep space. Your captain, who got his position by being the nephew of the owner of the company, has no experience in anything other than reading haphazardly in the field of science fiction.
Tom, get off the fucking ship!
schrodinger's cat
This is my response to a MoU column earlier this week, it works well for Bobo, as well.
BTW: Kitteh in the picture is WoW or Whiskers of Wisdom, and claims that he can replace both MoU and Bobo.
Tom Levenson
@schrodinger’s cat: Friedman’s “work” was an awesome display of fail.
karen marie
Is Bobo Catholic?
And on what planet were women ever, “on average,” less confident than men?
WA_Dave
The problem with the type of polling Brooks is engaged in is very simple:
How much do you have to hate yourself to read BoBo?
Trollhattan
Perhaps plumbing the collected knowledge of the students in Bobo’s university “class” has not proven the wellspring of column inches he had envisioned. My suggestion is he next take a ride with one of Friedman’s cabbies. The cabbie should run directly into a stout wall at a brisk speed. I’m betting Bobo doesn’t like the social constriction of seatbelts.
Roger Moore
@Mandalay:
In a real sense, Bobo is Tom’s professional opposite, or at least the professional opposite of what he’s trying to teach. A science writer is supposed to keep up with what’s happening in science, find what’s important for everyone to understand, and write something that accurately summarizes the latest findings in a way that’s accessible to a typical layperson.
David Brooks tries to make it look like he’s a science writer following the latest developments in the social sciences, but he does everything wrong. Instead of taking what’s there and making it comprehensible, he decides what he wants to say and either selects something that supports his conclusions (no matter how far out on the fringe) or takes something popular and quote mines and twists it to support his beliefs. Dissecting his writings like this is a good way of demonstrating how to recognize the difference between real science writing and propaganda.
catclub
I think “…single-endedly solves the fertilizer shortage”
would also work.
Ever hear of Sagrado-itis of the mouth? (Red Sky at Morning)
David
I never read Brooks, but I read criticism of Brooks every chance I get (and it’s really a small industry now). It never fails to put a smile on my face and a song in my heart.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
This of course begs the real question: a generation after the BOBOist revolution, are NYT op-ed readers, on average, more ignorant and less well informed than people who decide to give it a pass?
Forum Transmitted Disease
Where he disposes with politics and just goes directly to shitting on the faces of those less fortunate than himself.
Those are my favorites.
Hoodie
@Roger Moore: Propagandist or Mr. Magoo?
Roger Moore
@Hoodie:
Propagandist, and, as Tom says, a skillful one. If he were just a bozo, he’d misinterpret different things in different ways. Since he always manages to twist them into the same small set of highly politicized meanings, it’s obvious that he’s doing it as part of a coherent propaganda campaign.
Hattie
Pardon me. I have to go talk to the man upstairs.
Mike in NC
David Brooks is a professional Republican pundit/pseudo-intellectual, so why would he have the slightest interest in this crazy “science” thing?
Roger Moore
@Mike in NC:
The classic way of expressing it is the old chestnut about the way a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination. Republicans are perfectly happy to support any scientific finding or idea that agrees with what they already believe or can be convincingly distorted so that it appears to support what they believe. It’s Brooks’s demonstrated skill at the latter that attracts Mr. Levenson’s professional attention.
NotMax
Brooks has bumped his skull on the edge of the salad bar sneeze guard a few too many times.
Brooks, circa 1890:
Seanly
Bobo is just an idiot partisan hack. He reads sociological & psychological papers and feels he understands what they say, but he actually doesn’t.
Hoodie
@Roger Moore: Maybe Mr. Magoo was a propagandist, just a very pleasant one who always appeared to live very comfortably. Kind of like Brooks. Everything was interpreted as flattering to himself. Banality of evil kind of thing.
joes527
@Seanly:
Otto West: Apes don’t read philosophy.
Wanda: Yes they do, Otto. They just don’t understand it.
NotMax
@Seanly
Always enjoyed this hoary definition of sociology.
Sociology: the art of taking a crystal clear concept and making it opaque
quannlace
Less confident? Maybe he thinks he’s channeling a ‘Not so fresh’ commercial.
Chris
Must be a hell of a world when that’s the biggest question on your mind.
Bruce S
I’m going to leave you on your own with this one. I’m tired of the guy.
IowaOldLady
I started to read through his reasoning and then decided I didn’t care.
Kathleen
@schrodinger’s cat: You would probably enjoy this column by Matt Taibbi: http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/276-74/17252-focus-the-ultimate-thomas-friedman-porn-title
EconWatcher
OT: I love K-thug. Love him to death, really.
But he wrote the oddest defense today of Rogoff and Reinhart against the charge that they are “crude mercenaries.” He said they’re not crude mercenaries; they are “fine economists” who just got carried away with all the fame and attention they got when they wrote a sloppy paper saying exactly what the Very Serious People want to hear, and then couldn’t bring themselves to protest against the misuse of their work:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/03/varieties-of-academic-temptation/
Huh? Help me out, here. I’m having trouble seeing the distinction between this and being a crude mercenary.
K-thug keeps posting on this topic again and again. It’s really getting to him, and I get the idea it’s because he personally knows these people and can’t bring himself to believe they did what they obviously did.
Y’all are probably sick of this topic, but I just can’t take my eyes off of it. I can’t remember a case of esteemed academics who exerted so much influence and then plummeted this badly and this quickly.
Kathleen
.
Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS)
Tom L. is right to poke at Brooks’ faux -ological meanderings. It’s painful for anyone who knows anything about these subjects to watch him and MoU and Chunky Bobo stomp all over the fields with their bullshit “consistent correlation and trends” spotting. That they do so from the pages of The Paper of Record, have book contracts and give sessions at Yale, Aspen, Davos and the like are all the more reason to shine a serious spotlight on their criminal abuse of language in service of ideology.
Redshift
Hmm, that’s exactly what I figured out about George Will when I stopped reading him, lo these many years ago. I wonder who long it’s been, if ever, since there was a respected conservative columnist for whom that wasn’t the case.
Seriously, I do wonder. In my father’s generation, before the Conservative Movement, were there actual intellectually honest writers on that side of the spectrum, or has it always been bullshit all the way down?
SiubhanDuinne
@NotMax:
Cataracts!
Redshift
@EconWatcher: Yeah, I thought it was kind of weird, too.
I think his point is that they’ve done solid work in the past and they got seduced by fame rather than money, as opposed to the typical wingnut welfare type (or Pete Peterson variant) who are openly paid propagandists. I also wouldn’t be surprised if it’s partly that PK knows them professionally and is struggling to understand why people who were real researchers won’t admit they were so obviously wrong.
Narcissus
Brooks would be a lot more tolerable if he lost his virginity
aimai
Its time for me to repeat myself, from a conversation Tom and I had about Brooks a few years ago “If Evil were a little pink pig, it would be David Brooks.” My point, and I did have one, is that there is a kind of voluptuously innocent nudity to Brooks’s horrible writing–its transparently awful, its shining with its own grease and slippery with its own filth, but its almost embarrassingly naive. He is eternally (apparently) unaware of his own corruption and his own agenda and yet its relentless and uninflected by anything like the critical facililty or moral reasoning he pretends to laud.
Take, for example, the woman he quotes. Really? Is that what she, and he, think the point of Jesus and Christian Salvation is? To make the “owner” of salvation just a tiny bit more self satisfied and self actualized than the other losers on the business team? Because that’s what it sounds like.
I’m not as surprised by this as one might be because years ago I heard my Republican, Christian, sister in law explaining to my nephew that they would be covering “Teamwork” in Vacation Bible Study Class–Teamwork like St. Paul meant in the New Testament.
Bobo’s religiosity, like his science, is always in the service of the wealthier, more activated “you!” He’s like a copy writer hired from Mad Men to be an Op Ed writer. He just takes the old Madison Avenue nostrums and repurposes them for a “select” audience.
stoned stats
Boubon and a TL takedown of Bobo on a Friday afternoon. Life couldn’t be better!
Redshift
Gee, I dunno, perhaps it’s the classic wingnut “no matter how much things have improved, if your program hasn’t totally eliminated target problem between when you started and now, it’s a failure” (e.g., “The War on Poverty was a failure because we still have poverty.”)
This is in contrast to the evaluation of conservative policies, where even if they have made things dramatically worse, it’s always certain that they’ll work in the long run if you just wait long enough and don’t let any non-conservative thinking interfere.
(Plus, in this case, there’s the added sauce of only purporting to evaluate how people say they feel rather than the material and status gains of feminism, which is particularly ironic since claiming that the purpose of a liberal agenda is only to make people feel better is the first thing conservatives do when they try to mock it.)
Roger Moore
@stoned stats:
I think you need a broader perspective. Life would be a lot better with full employment and Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.
Mandalay
@Roger Moore:
OK, I see what you are coming from, but I don’t understand why you and Tom are acting as though Brooks is masquerading as a science writer. He isn’t, he IS (obviously) writing propaganda, and right above his articles it states in huge letters “The Opinion Pages”.
He may well be cherry picking his “data” (i.e. reader emails) to fit his agenda, but so what? What opinion writer doesn’t? He is not claiming to be a social scientist or a statistician. And if he is also a slippery and sloppy writer, with illogical conclusions, so what? BFD, and hardly news breaking.
And Tom is just as guilty as Brooks of overplaying his hand, with his absurd paraphrasing and distortion of what Brooks actually wrote: “We need to behave properly, as our faith teaches us, as the manners of our mythical ancestors would have us, as the non-sexually-abusing members of Brooklyn Orthodox communities may be claimed to act.“.
That’s nonsense on a par with anything Brooks wrote. If you want to throw stones, don’t live in a glass house.
Wag
Tom is trying to do to Bobo what he did to McMegan.
I fully support the effort and thoroughly enjoy reading the fruits of his labors.
Keep doing this, please.
muddy
I recently met a young woman, just graduating college, who was very favorable about him when his name came up at a lunch. She said everyone likes *him*. She considers herself a liberal. Young people these days.
Just Some Fuckhead
Words about David Brooks should be required to be traded like carbon credits.
Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS)
@Mandalay:
Bobos in Paradise.
Your “BFD” is exactly one of the main reasons we are in the mess we are in as a nation, because Brooks’ bullshit is peddled without pushback because “It’s just your opinion, man.”
Fuck off.
aimai
@Mandalay:
Brooks is masquerading as a public intellectual. The categories “Science Writer” and “Social Science Writer” are not as distinct as you are pretending. Brooks’s beat is to create a tenuous link between current social science or philosophy or anthropology writing with a fundamentally conservative world view. He always begins with what appears to be an innocent question or a current topic of social science/hard science debate and then he moves smartly to proving something that is of value to his stunted world view: he will go from an account of monkeys to “discovering” that modern Natalist policies among the right wing are really hard wired. Or he will go from a discussion of new work on altruism to “discovering” that when poor people win the lottery they always squander the money and he will end up proving that charity does more harm than good. I used to amuse myself by trying to spot where Brooks was going as early as I could in each column. My personal best was guessing on the very first sentence. That’s because if you read enough brooks you get a feel for the particular goals he is pursuing and you know exactly the frame he is going to put on everything in service of that goal. He can end up in the same place from a reading of a popular recipe for chocolate chip cookies as he does from a new study of the death penalty. He’s such a hollow man that he literally has no goals at this point other than political disinformation masquerading as intellectual inquiry.
K488
This past weekend the Times had a long article about a European sociologist who had been faking his work for about a decade. One of the phrases I remember from the discussion suggested that the reason his work had not received closer scrutiny was that his work confirmed the assumptions of his audience. That guy lost his job; Brooks, by not having tried to mount his schtick in an actual department (pace Yale, but damn them), will not. But they both confect something out of nothing, and use their imaginations to offer a kind of reassurance to the comfortable. Both put me beside myself with rage.
Karen Crosby
David F. Brooks is a concern troll who can’t write.
Karen Crosby
David F. Brooks is a concern troll who can’t write.
Mandalay
@Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS):
You are being ridiculous.
Classy.
Mandalay
@aimai:
Fine. I accept that he is a shallow and mediocre fraud with an agenda. But why all the pearl clutching and drama on BJ every time HE posts, as opposed to any other journalist on the right? It seems ridiculously out of proportion to me.
MikeJ
@aimai:
It’s not just Brooks, but wingnuts in general. Back when I used to listen to WWDTM, the most annoying part of the show was always when P. J. O’Rourke would be on and they would do the bit with two fake news stories and one real one. O’Rourke never, ever, ever missed an opportunity to make his fake story about the failure of the liberals in his imagination.
Jebediah
If punditry were subject to peer review, would Bobo have had a single word published yet?
On the other hand, if the peers doing the reviewing were other pundits…
Omnes Omnibus
@Mandalay: Because he has a NYT column. Because he is taken seriously as a “reasonable” conservative – even though he is not one.
Yutsano
@Mandalay:
Because Tom chooses to. You are well aware of your options if you don’t like this state of affairs.
Just Some Fuckhead
@MikeJ:
Haha.. remember when PJ O’Rourke was funny, back in the mid-to-late 70s for about 6 months? It may be too early for you.
Just Some Fuckhead
NEW OPEN THREAD ASSHOLES.
Christ, 47 front pagers here and not one of the prissy fucks can be bothered to start a fresh thread occasionally.
MikeJ
@Just Some Fuckhead: I assume it was when he was writing for the Lampoon.
Yutsano
@Just Some Fuckhead:
[citation needed]
Hungry Joe
Yeah, yeah, charlatan social science writer, etc. etc. Never mind all that. The man actually prioduced this sentence —
“The essays were highly idiosyncratic, and I don’t want to impose a false order on them that isn’t there.”
— and it appeared in the New York Times. Jesus H., a false order that isn’t there ? As opposed to a false order that is there? Or a real order that isn’t there? More to the point — the only point, really — how is it possible to receive payment, in legal tender, for writing that badly?
Omnes Omnibus
@Yutsano: This was reasonably funny.
Just Some Fuckhead
@MikeJ: Yeah, back when drugs humor was still edgy.
Mandalay
@Omnes Omnibus: Gotcha.
raven
@MikeJ: Lotta whining about the tickets.
Wag
Damn it. Moderation. Please release?
Hungry Joe
@Just Some Fuckhead:
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
O’Rourke’s essay collection “Holidays in Hell” (I was reviewing — had to read it) from the late ’80s is one of the most hateful books I’ve ever forced myself through. He globe-trotted to desperately poor, and war-torn, and failing Communist countries and made great sport of the ineptitude and suffering of the people therein. I’ve loathed, just loathed the man ever since.
jeffreyw
Thread badly needs some puppeh.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Hungry Joe: No, before that. He had this schtick about getting arrested for..
Oh, nevermind.
NEW OPEN THREAD ASSHOLES
raven
@jeffreyw: Nice. Bohdi is very concerned about the construction project. I’ve taken down most of the deck and the dog door will be closed in the morning.
Ben Franklin
OK, contest.
Okay, contest time. What would a Tom Friedman porn film be called? I nominate “Something Really Big Is Happening.”
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/contest-come-up-with-the-ultimate-thomas-friedman-porn-title-20130502#ixzz2SHAKpuYW
Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook
I have a couple of entries.
“That looks like a mushroom…….wait”
Amir Khalid
@Omnes Omnibus:
I bought that book once, as a wedding present for a friend.
jeffreyw
@raven: Good dog! Here’s Homer, pretending to be a good kitteh.
Roger Moore
@aimai:
More importantly, many people completely fail to draw the line between serious science writers (including social science writers) and pundits who like to refer to scientific articles to support their points. The result is that people like Brooks can add a pseudo-intellectual sheen to their writing and claim false authority by making a few comments about modern sociology or whatever discipline is supposed to support their points. It doesn’t help if the stuff they’re talking about is in a paper journal or hidden behind a paywall so even dedicated readers will have a hard time seeing if the articles they’re quoting support their points.
It doesn’t help that the average American has been very badly educated about science. Even people who take a bunch of science classes have been taught mostly about science as an authoritative source of facts, rather than about science as a methodology for learning about the world. The result is that most people are primed to accept anything that comes out of a scientific study and to see the newest information as the most valuable, rather than to view cutting-edge work as highly provisional and subject to drastic revision with the next study.
raven
@jeffreyw: Look at that dude!
Ben Franklin
Holy shit, y’all don’t have a fuckin sense of humor.
Keith G
@Mandalay:
Because talking about fecklessness on their side is better than talking about the lack of important results on our side.
For some, I suppose Brooks gets singled out due to issues of aspiration. He writes rhetorical checks that his intellectual process cannot cash. So, is he just daft or is he purposely disingenuous?
Just Some Fuckhead
@Ben Franklin: Sorry, when you say Tom Friedman and porn in the same sentence, I automatically stop thinking and start masturbating.
Odie Hugh Manatee
“David Brooks Single-Handedly Solves the Fertilizer Shortage”
Good thing since Rick Perry and the Republicans are busy using what we have on hand to prove that business is booming in Texas.
Amir Khalid
@Ben Franklin:
You evoke the image of Tom Friedman in a porn film (bleargh!) and you expect us to laugh?
Ben Franklin
@Keith G:
I thought the Bargle was supposed to allow the airway to remain open, intermittently, that is.
Keith G
@Ben Franklin:
What would a Tom Friedman p0rn film be called?:
“What the Cabbie Taught Me”
Tom Levenson
@Ben Franklin: @Amir Khalid:
Actually, I followed the link and did.
I have (not terribly well) hidden shallows.
Ben Franklin
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Thank god. I thought I’d killed all the humor here.
Jebediah
@jeffreyw:
That is some mighty fine puppy!
Just Some Fuckhead
@Ben Franklin: Don’t sell yourself short.
Keith G
@Ben Franklin: Oooops.
But then again, getting insufficient oxygen to his noggin might explain some of Brooks’ efforts.
Ben Franklin
@Ben Franklin:
S’OK, Your boat has a shallow draft.
Ben Franklin
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Don’t sell yourself short.
Your entry goes to the link.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Ben Franklin: That’s not my entry. My entry is “Suck On This”.
Cassidy
I need a fucking band saw. Goddamn pinewood derby tommorrow and I’m trying to carve the cars with a fucking dremel tool. Fuck it.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Cassidy: I have one you can use.
SatanicPanic
Time to start drinking!
Roger Moore
@Cassidy:
I realize some people hate Nickelback, but that sounds like an extreme solution to the problem.
Tonal Crow
Bah humbug. Religion is just another personal choice — that is, relativism. Religionists bite like starving vampires at philosophy.
Mike in NC
@Just Some Fuckhead: O’Rourke wrote “Holidays in Hell”, which was pretty damn funny. That was 20+ years ago. Now he’s just an asshole curmudgeon.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Mike in NC:
Mike, have you met Hungry Joe? Hungry Joe, this is Mike. The two of you are going to get along famously.
PurpleGirl
@schrodinger’s cat: LOL. Very good, brilliant as the English say.
Mike in NC
@Just Some Fuckhead: Oh well, it was more than 20 years ago…
schrodinger's cat
@PurpleGirl: Thanks PurpleGirl.
I love the kitteh’s expression.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Mike in NC:
Yep, and we were all under the evil spell of Richard Marx.
Roger Moore
@Just Some Fuckhead:
At least it wasn’t Gummo.
Roy G.
@Ben Franklin: I predict the gangbang film will be called something like:
Hot, Flat and Crowded, starring Seven Friedman Units
Hungry Joe
@Just Some Fuckhead: Troublemaker. My mom used to tell me not to play with kids like you. (She was wrong, of course.)
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Keith G:
The Friedman and his Unit: Six Months of Humping
Ben Franklin
The United States believes Israel has conducted an airstrike into Syria, two U.S. officials tell CNN.
U.S. and Western intelligence agencies are reviewing classified data showing Israel most likely conducted a strike in the Thursday-Friday time frame, according to both officials. This is the same time frame that the U.S. collected additional data showing Israel was flying a high number of warplanes over Lebanon.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/03/world/meast/israel-airstrike-syria/
RobNYNY1957
@Just Some Fuckhead: I don’t thing that really happened. I remember reading just a short passage from some book where he thought it hilarious that people in Latin America didn’t understand him, no matter how loud he shouted English.
rda909
@Ben Franklin: Tommy does accept paychecks from the (Sasha) Grey Lady, sooo…how about “Sodom Who Sane?” “Shock And Awwww, Awww, YES!”
(“Suck On This” is too easy)
Tehanu
@aimai:
Hi aimai. You’re a better soul than I, Gunga Din, because I cannot force myself to read anything Bobo writes — I literally want to throw up halfway through the first sentence, no matter what it is.
johnny aquitard
@Cassidy: Try a coping saw? It’s sorta like a hand powered jigsaw. They might have one at Ho Medepot or Lowes. Depending on your time zone and store hours they might still be open. You’ll need some clamps to hold the workpiece down though.
Edit: A four-in-hand (combo wood rasp/file with a flat side and a curved side) works great for shaping and scuplting. They’ll have those too and they’re pretty inexpensive.
Sean
@Villago Delenda Est:
Touchdown Jesus is recently looking for a new gig.
Fred
Seems to this poster that the very question of personal confidence is by it’s nature a question requiring self-appraisal. If said self-appraisal is invalid then just throw the whole thing on the junk heap and don’t bother to waste everybodies time asking the question.
Betsy
@Hoodie: a generation after feminism, are men still on average more confident than women?