Inflammatory Writ

a) ACKNOWLEDGING the inevitable demise of the dead-tree publishing model and the general inadequacy of television (“TV”) as a medium for most intelligent discourse,

b) APPRECIATING that the Internet is a great place for goofing off and watching pornography and telling penis jokes about Lady Gaga, while,

c) FURTHER APPRECIATING that it’s also a pretty great place to learn something new and interesting about the substantive and not-so-substantive issues of the day,

Be it resolved that Brutish&Short

• SEEKS to establish itself as a website where people can discover new and interesting things about the substantive and not-so-substantive issues of the day;
• PROMISES to conduct itself with poise and erudition, accented by a dash of whimsy and a pinch of ill-advised humor;
• RECOGNIZES AND IS NOT DISCOURAGED by the fact that a pithy comment can often say more than a 5,000-word news article;
• ENCOURAGES BOTH the practice of pithy commenting and long form journalism;
• HOLDS TO BE SELF EVIDENT that, though the simplest truths are sometimes mistaken for legitimate topics of controversy by practitioners of contrarianism, libertarianism, evangelism, and other schismatic -isms, the truth — whether moral or empirical — nevertheless exists;
• HASTENS TO ADD that it sometimes pisses us off when the simplest of truths are cynically denied or obfuscated;
• FURTHER AFFIRMS that decency is a moral attribute, while civility is a social protocol that is often exploited to steer a discussion away from its core (the kernel that actually means something for how we do — and should — live our lives), and therefore:
• ASSERTS that it is more important for human beings to be decent than civil;
• WILL, ON A RELATED NOTE, CONSIDER ITSELF at liberty to swear at you and call you names if you are being an asshole, because Brutish&Short:
• BELIEVES that calling it like you see it is generally preferable to pretending an asshole’s non-argument merits either serious scrutiny or the ambiguity of being ignored;
• CONCURRENTLY ENDEAVORS TO BE appropriately abashed when we are wrong;
• INTENDS TO FOCUS mostly on politics, culture, the arts, music, literature, sports, recipes, paleontology, comic books, venereal diseases, cute videos of cats on YouTube, and the ways in which various media shape how these things are received by The People and Their Children.

(Brutish&Short is, above all, for The Children.)