Dave Defends Raping Boys

That's more or less the argument Brooks makes in today's column on the Penn State boy rape. He trots out the old "You don't know what you would do until you're in that situation" chestnut, then cites the usual suspects: genocide, Kitty Genovese.

 

Not Even Close

Yeah. Right. Except there's really not much of a comparison between the Kitty Genovese or Rwandan genocide cases and stumbling on the football coach butt fucking a little boy in the locker room shower. There are scenarios when it's legitimate to say you can't know what you would do until you're in that situation. But this isn't one of them. All the witness had to do was to call out, "Hey! Stop raping that boy!"

Both Sides Now

Once again, Dave argues both sides to make no meaningful point. He spends the bulk of the column citing wishy-washy social science that defends moral relativism -- we see what we want to see, blah blah blah -- but then concludes by implying it's our wishy-washing, moral relativism that allows us to let grownups rape boys in locker rooms. Just more of Brooks's bottomless intellectual dishonesty.

What's your next column? Defending the Catholic Church's right to rape boys?

Oy ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/opinion/the-inequality-map.html

So if church inequality, ancestor inequality, moral fitness inequality and spending inequality are unacceptable, we can look forward to Brooks’s next column announcing that he’s leaving the Republican Party.

Vey

Foreign visitors often come up to me and ask, “Why does David Brooks get a column in the New York Times?" And I answer, "Damned if I know. Nice cupcakes!"

Wrong Again

Today, DB complains about "Blue Inequality."

There is so much that's wrong with Brooks's analysis, but let's stick to just two points. First, the complaint about 1% vs. 99% is not exclusively about income inequality; that's a literal and tendentious interpretation. The complaint comprises educational inequality as well as income inequality, in part because college is becoming financially out of reach for all but the most affluent, which of course further entrenches the divide.

There is almost no relation between the general economy and the economics of higher education. In that sense, higher education is similar to health care: the costs exist in their own spheres.

Ain't Data Great?

Brooks is so enamored of social science statistics and research. There's plenty of data about students graduating college saddled with crushing debt, and that Congress refuses to address the problem. Why does the federal government charge 7% on student loans?

That's the second point: Brooks is absolutely correct to underscore the links between education and educational attainment on the one hand, and individual, community and national social and economic well-being on the other (e.g., income, health, family dynamics, social cohesion).

So what's Brooks's solution? Complain about young, White, urban liberals.

Really?

It's liberals and progressives who have been drawing attention to the social consequences of educational disparities at least since before Brown v. Board of Education. There’s plenty of social science and developmental research on how critical early childhood support is to academic success and lifelong well-being. Go read some. Fool!

If Brooks and other conservatives believe education is so critical to social well-being, as liberals have been screaming about for generations, why don’t they support, say, early childhood learning instead of gutting public education and diverting tax dollars to religious schools?

Brooks’s intellectual dishonesty is breathtaking.

Obscure References to Others' Thoughts and Work

The economists Jon Bakija, Adam Cole and Bradley Heim

Meaningless Data

• Roughly 31 percent
• About 16 percent
• 14 percent
• 8 percent
• 5 percent
• About 2 percent
• 38 percent
• 75 percent
• tens of millions of Americans
• 40 percent
• 50 percent

Oh No You Didn't

Did Brooks really tag the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations as anti-Semitic in today's column?

I think he did!

"Take the Occupy Wall Street movement. This uprising was sparked by the magazine Adbusters, previously best known for the 2004 essay, Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish? — an investigative report that identified some of the most influential Jews in America and their nefarious grip on policy."

What a putz.

Don't Let the Facts Get in the Way of an Ignorant Argument

Brooks laments what he declares to be the lack of innovation in America today, variously the "innovation slowdown" and "innovation stagnation."

Well, Dave, it certainly doesn’t help that our political leaders don’t believe in science, anthropology or climate change; that they put more faith in faith than in ideas; and that they block public investment in science, research and things like, oh, alternative energy. Like the Green Economy Brooks slammed a couple of weeks ago for not having created 300 million new jobs in two years.

Best Unsupported, Ideological Swipe

“... the environmentalist ethos has undermined the faith in gee-whiz technological wizardry.” So it’s all the fault of environmentalism?

Gratuitous References to Obscure Writers

• Michael Mandel

• Tyler Cowen

• Neal Stephenson

• Peter Thiel

Unnecessary Reference to Overused Thinker

• Einstein

Boy, Gomer! That Brooks feller sure is smart!

It's Official

It’s impossible to take David Brooks seriously. It seems as if he’s not even trying to be intellectually honest. Here, he blames the imminent collapse of the U.S. economy on:

• consumers
• the credit crunch
• housing prices
• the freeze in business investment
• skills mismatch
• regulatory burdens
• the business class’s utter lack of confidence in the White House
• the looming explosion of entitlement costs
• the public’s lack of confidence in institutions across the board

And of Course ...

Obama’s failure to seize that seminal moment in history, the Simpson-Bowles report.

But not a word about the banks, insurance companies and financial institutions that hollowed out the economy in order to enrich themselves.

No Countrywide, no Goldman Sachs, no AIG, no Bank of America. Don’t they at least get a mention alongside regulatory burdens and business executives’ lack of confidence in Obama? No GOP obstructionism?

Oh, if only we had seized Simpson-Bowles! And fully funded the McKinney Act! If only those greedy old pensioners would stop insisting on getting a return on their Social Security and Medicare payments, and if the poor would just shut up, go to college and get jobs, we’d be great again!

Hell No, You Won't!

As for politicians’ sclerotic thinking about public policy, Obama has proposed investment on a green economy and at least offered the public option as a way to restructure the health insurance market. What bold approaches have Republicans offered other than lockstep opposition to the colored guy in the White House and support for tax cuts for the rich?

Dave's Best Joke

Simplify the tax code. End corporate taxes and create a consumption tax. Reshape the European Union to make it either more unified or less (?!) Reduce the barriers to business formation. Reform Medicare so it is fiscally sustainable. Break up the banks and increase capital requirements. Lighten debt burdens even if it means hitting the institutional creditors.

Dave, the Republicans won’t even keep the FAA afloat for a week without turning it into a crisis. You really think they’ll go along with breaking up the banks and “hitting” institutional creditors?

Down With the EU!

Of course, your suggestion for reforming the EU, we're all with you on that one. Just as soon as we figure out what you're talking about.

There He Goes Again

"[A]t least Republicans respect Americans enough to tell us what they really think."

That's not worth dignifying with an insult. But I'll try.

Republicans say that the deficit and debt are existential threats. But if they honestly believed that, they'd support SOME tax increases if only to save the country from ruin. What they really believe is that the social safety net -- Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid -- should be dismantled and capitalism left to work its magic unregulated, and the rabble left unprotected.

Bush and Reagan ran up the debt and deficit to create a crisis -- starve the beast, they called it -- so they could dismantle the New Deal. Grover Norquist and his GOP marionettes want to "strangle government in the bathtub," or some weird construction like that.

You Lie!

But no, David, they won't tell us that. Because they don't respect us enough, and because they know they'll be pilloried at the polls.

David, you're still struggling with intellectual honesty. Try harder.