links Archive

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For reading….

By
Ben Nolan
– February 16, 2012

This one on how the safety net shapes the lives of middle class Americans comes via Alix, who particularly recommends the videos.

Wired article on the problems plaguing the green-tech industry. Between this and that hazards of statistical correlation-driven research in the biotech sector piece, Wired’s got me impressed.

William Howard Taft was a socialist communist pinko literally Hitler.

Between the lines of this one: Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. cannot fill the post-mass-manufacturing void in First World labour demand. The Information Economy makes for a techno-feudalistic society.  Chart:

fivetechcompanies-red.jpg

The Coming Insurrection — 2007 treatise by an anonymous committee of French anarchists that my friend Joan recommended I check out. Its ranty and pretty over-the-top, but also fun and provocative to read. Teaser:

Meanwhile, I manage. The quest for a self, my blog, my apartment, the latest fashionable crap, relationship dramas, who’s fucking who… whatever prosthesis it takes to hold onto an “I”! If “society” hadn’t become such a definitive abstraction, then it would denote all the existential crutches that allow me to keep dragging on, the ensemble of dependencies I’ve contracted as the price of my identity. The handicapped person is the model citizen of tomorrow. It’s not without foresight that the associations exploiting them today demand that they be granted a “subsistence income.”

PS – I was going through the pictures in my “pictures from the internet” folder, and stumbled onto this old beaut

*chuckle*

6

A Couple Thoughts on Having an Audience

By
Tom OHare
– November 30, 2011

At the beginning of this blog’s existence, we actually tried, you know. I sent out rude mass emails to people I knew and didn’t know, begging for submissions. Ben, Trevor, and I spent two months arguing over the finer points of our Inflammatory Writ, which I now actively dislike. We delayed launch dates over design issues, we planned our “media strategy,” we talked about Advertising Opportunities! And then, I don’t know. I suppose we learned the hard way that the blogosphere of 2011 isn’t anything at all like the blogosphere of 2003 or 2004. There is no place for advancement without institutional backing. Getting links from other blogs just doesn’t happen, because the voices are all entrenched, and they all just link to one another all the time. Scott Lemieux said this about that, sez John Cole, and I’m all like, “No shit, I read that blog, too.” And while it’s fun to stay current, I pretty frequently feel like I’m stuck in an echo chamber.

(But then, hell, the most obscure blog I read is M. Bouffant’s, and he’s bigger than we are. I’m a victim of the fallacy I seek to correct, too, buddy. I get it. I’m complaining here, not absolving myself of guilt.)

The point being that I didn’t expect to wake up this morning to an outpouring of vitriol toward a rather simple plea from my co-editor — to wit, old dudes, plz chill out w/ all the dix in the locker room every once in a while, plz. I especially didn’t expect it because the post was a week+ old and had garnered little to no critical attention prior to today. But fortunately, I had told Trevor when he published it to “Feature that motherfucking shit,” and so he did, and so begins the saga that was today in the brief but sordid history of the website.com that is Brutish & Short.

Herewith!

Yesterday, Andrew Sullivan’s intern came to our site and said, “Heh, men’s locker rooms are weird,” (Because it was still featured at the top even though it was a week old, remember? Remember??? I DID THAT FEATURING PEOPLE, OR SUGGESTED IT, OR WHATEVER!) and proposed that Andrew Sullivan make a standalone post about this ever-relevant topic, to which Andrew Sullivan consented. Because sure, no big deal. (Thanks magical intern, btw, for you being you and rendering us hopeful every once in a great while in this time of great dying. *wink*) So, right, so then Andrew Sullivan wrapped up his day and we were a couple spots from the top, and so everyone came blitzkrieging into this place like there was no tomorrow, which there was, they had to just scroll down a bit further or wait for Andrew and his interns to wake up during real-tomorrow.

ANYWAY. So I wake up in real-tomorrow, which is today, I might add, and — BLAM!!! — buncha comments. A lot of them were stupid. A few of them were not. As I can happily report at this time — 12 hours and a hundred+ comments later – if you go through the thread (which is pretty hilarious in its own right), I think that the stupid-to-worthwhile ratio has evened out somewhat, which, begrudgingly as I may say it, makes me think slightly more highly of Sully’s audience. (FWIW, Ben also wrote to Sully and told him about the hilarity of the comments section, which prompted him to do a follow-up on the issue [in which he published Ben's letter, the last one], leading to 10,000+ views today. Hooray! [Again, to that magical intern out there reading us, we offer sincerest thanks.])

ANYWAY. What was I saying? Oh, yeah, right: this whole idea of an audience is interesting. Interesting in the sense that I immediately hated many of our most vocal audience members, and interesting in the sense that it was nice to have a fucking reaction for once. I mean, I didn’t even write the thing — Trevor did, all accolades go to him — but I was proud to be defending it. Typing in ALL CAPS to concern trolls is one of the most therapeutic intellectual salves in the world. I cannot stress this enough. JUST TYPE IN ALL CAPS, PREFACE IT WITH LOL, USE POOR GRAMER, & UR GOLD. Words to live by if you ever have to deal with popularity. Which we don’t, thankfully. Thank God.

But today we did. And it was rather revealing, for me at least. Today we saw Andrew Sullivan’s audience at our dinner tables, and did they get a joke? Did they investigate the author of the article they were responding to? No. No. They went bananas and called us names. Then we made fun of them, and then a few saner ones showed up telling everyone else to CHILL, and then a few more of those came preaching the same, and in the end it was about fifty-fifty, I’d say. Just about around fifty-fifty. But it was an uphill battle the whole way.

I understand, with an audience like Sullivan’s, the mechanism by which he believes what he believes. What I don’t understand is why he gives equal credence to nutters and nominally sane people. Never will.

To those of you who are nominally sane, welcome to Brutish & Short dot com, we welcome your patriotism and stick-to-it-ed-ness, and we wish you nothing but the best in your Internet livelihoods. To those of you who are nutters, plz gtfo. Thx.

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So Many Fine Comments!!!

By
Tom OHare
– November 30, 2011

I know that it’s still up top and that you can see that there are suddenly 39 comments on the piece, but Trevor’s post about locker room etiquette really hit a nerve with some of Andrew Sullivan’s readers, who swarmed in last night to do mature stuff like accuse him of being a closeted homosexual! Oh, also, they don’t care what he thinks, but they’re going to comment about how much they don’t care just to prove they don’t care! It’s wonderful, is what I’m saying. Check it out!

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Three Things to Read

By
Tom OHare
– November 14, 2011

1) Via I-forget-who (maybe M.? definitely M. Bouffant, who showed up to correct my error in the comments, because this blog is nothing if not peer-reviewed), this takedown of Frank Miller’s laughable screed against Occupy Wall Street is couched in an examination of Miller’s uber-popular “300,” which happens to betray his authoritarian mean streak by being completely historically inaccurate.

Look, artists get a lot of leeway. At least in this society of freedom they do. (They sure didn’t get any slack in feudal times, dominated by warrior-caste bullies.) Miller and the makers of the 300 flick were entitled to emphasize the Spartans and their martial spirit, even though their brave “sacrifice” at Thermopylae accomplished absolutely nothing, except to make a fine tale of futile bravado. A one-day delay? We’re supposed to be impressed by a one-day delaying action?

(I’ll admit, it certainly offered a great excuse for ninety minutes of homoerotic prancing!  In fact, 300 gets full marks as a lavishly choreographed dance number. And for terrific painted-on abs.)

But there comes a point when artistic emphasis turns into deliberate, malicious omission.  And then omission becomes blatant, outright-evil lying propaganda. “300″ not only crosses that line, it forges into territory that we haven’t seen since the propaganda machine of 1930s Germany. White is black.  Black is white. Good is defined by the triumph of will.

2) On a related Occupy note, I was trying to think of a way to engage with this Aaron Bady piece about the Occupy Berkeley protests, but it’s probably best to simply let its excellence speak for itself:

As part of my ongoing private project to be less scared of police — because I am scared of police — I said to her, in as level and direct a tone as I could manage, “This is why we don’t trust you.” And she again elected to say nothing. She didn’t have to. The truth of power, in this situation, is that the policy is what the police will use their force to enforce. They don’t have to have a legitimate reason, nor are they embarrassed when it is shown that the “grass is closed” only because someone with authority said so. And the grass only became open because someone with more authority said so. Such people are not to be trusted.

3) Lastly, here’s Edith Zimmerman, on what it feels like to be 28 and on the irreversible path toward irrelevance and death:

Many years ago, my grandmother took me to McDonald’s for lunch, and the toy that came with the Happy Meal was a cricket that chirped when you spun its wings. (A “Mulan”-related toy, if that matters.)

“What do you mean it chirps?” my grandmother asked me.

“Wait, what do you mean?” I asked. “It’s chirping right now!”

Then there were about 30 seconds of me grinding its wings and holding it out as she tilted her head and listened.

“It’s not chirping,” she said.

“Yes it is!” I said.

We were both confused. What’s happening?

But then she decided that I wasn’t making it up and that it was just one of those high-pitched noises that her ears couldn’t hear anymore.

All of these are worth reading in full.

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Three Quick Hits

By
Tom OHare
– October 26, 2011

It’s cold suddenly, and it might snow tomorrow. So, here’s some quick hits before I go get some wings.

  • Apple has successfully patented the “Slide to Unlock” feature on iPhones and iPod Touches. Yglesias has some good points (this sort of patent is not in the public interest, e.g.), but most damning of all may be that the patent was likely awarded erroneously, since the feature existed for two years before Apple got around to “inventing” it.
  • Since we’re all #OWS around here all the time, Matt Taibbi has a pretty great post over at Rolling Stone. The thesis boils down to this: People aren’t angry at Wall Street because its employees are rich; they’re angry at Wall Street because everyone there cheated to get rich, then whined (mostly successfully) about rules designed to curb cheating.
  • Following on the above theme, Joshua Holland has a piece up at Alternet arguing that Occupy Wall Street has already achieved quite a lot in its short history. To wit, “[i]n just one month, the protesters have shifted the national dialogue from a relentless focus on the deficit to a discussion of the real issues facing Main Street: the lack of jobs — and especially jobs with decent benefits — spiraling inequality, cash-strapped American families’ debt-loads, and the pernicious influence of money in politics that led us to this point.”

Since I like to deliberately mislead my audience, here’s a fourth link to Jay Rosen’s takedown of NPR over their firing of Lisa Simone. Simone, if you haven’t been keeping up, hosted NPR’s opera show, World of Opera, and she made the mistake of joining Occupy DC without concealing her identity — which is apparently a fire-able offense for the host of A FUCKING SHOW ABOUT FUCKING OPERA. Anyway, Rosen’s title alone is worth your click through, so I won’t spoil the fun.

We are Brutish&Short. All “Occupy X,” all the time. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go get some wings.

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1) Hipster Dummy Text, and 2) Online Dating Nightmares

By
Tom OHare
– August 12, 2011

Oh, yes. This describes some acquaintances of mine rather too well. Behold, the vinyl lorem ipsum:

Organic sustainable lomo, +1 irony McSweeney’s skateboard Portland PBR tattooed farm-to-table Terry Richardson Williamsburg. Organic farm-to-table wolf, next level shit put a bird on it freegan American Apparel Williamsburg chambray gentrify viral you probably haven’t heard of them keffiyeh Cosby sweater. Pitchfork photo booth fuck, DIY cardigan messenger bag butcher Thundercats tofu you probably haven’t heard of them whatever squid VHS put a bird on it. Thundercats fixie Williamsburg, photo booth synth vinyl dreamcatcher Wes Anderson cliche. You probably haven’t heard of them DIY mlkshk biodiesel McSweeney’s raw denim. Skateboard Pitchfork Etsy, photo booth messenger bag artisan raw denim beard Tumblr retro Austin. Wes Anderson sustainable keffiyeh, blog lomo craft beer cliche brunch homo skateboard biodiesel fanny pack Pitchfork you probably haven’t heard of them Stumptown.

Reminds me of art shows, the West Coast, Brookyln, and (shamefacedly now) my getting-around-town bike. (via Kottke)

***

Unrelated but equally charming is this Tumblr that Scott Lemieux pointed me towards. Seems to probe the depths of the online dating world for those unwilling to participate (You should try it, it’s fun! [No, it's really not]). Mostly? Skeevy messages from strange dudes talking about golden showers, cum, how nice they are, etc, followed by some trenchant analysis. A sample:

You look like Rachael Maddow, but pretty, not like a lesbian.

_____________________________________

+7 because Rachel Maddow is a very attractive woman, so thanks, kind of?

+6 for the insinuation that lesbians are by definition not pretty. Dude, have you seen Portia de Rossi?

+2 for the negging. Come on, dudes, we have all read The Game. Stop with the vaguely insulting observations.

+3 for ever thinking it’s a good idea to use the “You look like so-and-so, but pretty!” line. If you think someone looks like an unattractive celebrity, keep it to yourself. No lady wants to hear that she’s a spitting image of 2002 Nick Nolte (1976 Nick Nolte, ok).

Ha! Sometimes human beings make me wish I was not one of them.

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A List of Things to Read Elsewhere on the WWW, Because I’ve Got Shit to Do

By
Tom OHare
– June 14, 2011

Somehow, these things always end up taking an hour, though. Let’s go quick. Now. Get ‘er done!

  • M. Bouffant reminds me that I need to quit smoking. So does the cough, folks, so does the cough.
  • Michele Bachmann (R-Crazypantsland) wants to do away with the EPA, because jobs (duh, sheeple) and also because WHAT HAVE THEY EVER DONE FOR ANYONE EXCEPT STUPID OZONE LAYERS AND STUFF.
  • The Bruins won their sporting event last night. Now, if they could just figure out a way to win in Vancouver.
  • Obligatory link to interesting thing (in this case, the Playboy Bunny Employee Manual from 1969) from Jason Kottke. If you guys would just go ahead and subscribe to his blog, I wouldn’t have to whore for him so much.
  • “I do worry that if this bill goes through, the number of companies going public will fall even more, and the investing public will have access to even less of the investable universe than it does at present. Is it a good idea that only VCs and plutocrats have access to asset classes like fast-growing VC-backed companies? Probably not. But I’m also not sure that’s in and of itself reason to oppose this bill. The key constituency here is the SEC: if they’re OK with this, it’ll go through. And maybe Facebook won’t go public after all.” But I want Facebook to go public and ASPLODE, Felix Salmon. (Actually I would probably buy one share at $150 and watch my money double in two hours, and then SELL! SELL ! SELL! Actually, who am I kidding? Poor people don’t invest in the stock market.)
  • Advice for the Boston Bruins, many of whom read this blog on the regular. (No one with more fervor than the doubly first-named Tim Thomas, who also gets his hair cut and playoff beard tidied at a barbershop owned by the same guy that owns the barbershop my friend Dan gets his haircut at. The bar is set very low for discussions at bars.)
  • I try to boycott the Huffington Post because it is terrible, but the fact that it’s also a shitty employer is another reason to stop giving it pageviews. Writers don’t get a lot of credit in this society, even though we now arguably read more than we ever have. My mother worked as the editor of a small town weekly newspaper, and watched with dismay as it was repeatedly bought and sold by corporate charlatans who didn’t give a shit about the lives of the people working there, or the fact that they often worked 60-hour weeks on paltry salaries to produce a thing of value to the community. Nah, instead it was, “Well, we’re just going to have to do more with less,” and similar horseshit, despite the fact that local news was one of the few bright-ish spots in a generally declining industry. Anyway, she quit, and she’s got a better-paying job now, but her passion was always the news, and writing about it, and it’s a damn shame that the people who make money off of writers’ backs are so often tightfisted pricks about it.
  • Conversely, Matt Yglesias somehow doesn’t understand that people deserve to be paid for their labor. He’s a likable enough guy, that Yglesias, but he’s also friendly with Megan McArdle. Which says what it says. As Loomis mentions at the link, “A 22 year old today wanting to write about politics simply can’t become what Yglesias became. I don’t see the problem in just admitting that.” We’re all 27, which makes us even later to the party. But, fuck it! It’s fun enough! I guess.
  • While we’re on the topic of the common man/woman: sucks to be in the working class!
  • Finally, last night Dan Savage got some much deserved love last night for the “It Gets Better” campaign. Also, it is never too late to Google Santorum.

Off to eat chicken tikka masala. If nobody’s looking and I get drunk enough, I’ll eat with my hands. INDIA BIG UPS!

1

Assorted Links, For The Discerning Internet User

By
Tom OHare
– June 8, 2011

I worked all day. Sorry! Here are some things that are worth reading.

I would love to tell you that this website will work, that we’ll entertain you five days a week and blend sports and pop culture successfully. The truth is, I don’t know for sure. This site will keep changing over the next few months just like Jimmy’s show kept changing in 2003, hopefully for the right reasons and not the wrong ones. We are still hiring people. We are still finding writers. We will eventually have a sports blog and a pop culture blog (launching next month), user comments (later this summer), a podcast network (ditto), a quarterly publication we’re doing with McSweeney’s (four a year, starting this winter), and who knows what else. You figure out what works, you figure out what doesn’t work, you keep moving. That’s the next nine months for us. Eventually, we will evolve into what we are. Whatever the hell that is.

  • “It’s not every day I read an essay that provokes me to say of an anti-Semite and woman hater ‘this guy deserved better.’ Carnavale ‘accuses’ Dahl and his work of being macabre, unpleasant, and filled with unhealthy sexuality, which is a little like accusing Hemingway of being terse. Carnavale knows that this is the point of Roald Dahl, but can’t let anything get in the way of  his argument Or perhaps I should say, get in the way of his observations. The post is researched the way a junior high school student researches a report about the tides: the act is accumulation, not construction.” — I like this Freddie deBoer fellow who occasionally blogs at Balloon Juice. I am also of the opinion that Dahl wrote the best children’s literature of the 20th century.
  • Timothy Geithner is the reason that unemployment is at 9.1%. I’m beginning to think that this song may be The Seminal Protest Song of our generation.
  • Happy 10th Anniversary of Bush’s Tax Cuts Day!
  • Ctrl+F “Career-o-Matic” over at Slate, and type the name of a Hollywood actor into the little box. Voila! Critical reception of his or her career, in chart form, courtesy of the good people at Rotten Tomatoes. It’s like Google Ngrams for the Us Weekly set!
  • “In the space of three short years, then, drugs had become available to treat what at that time were regarded as the three major categories of mental illness—psychosis, anxiety, and depression—and the face of psychiatry was totally transformed. These drugs, however, had not initially been developed to treat mental illness. They had been derived from drugs meant to treat infections, and were found only serendipitously to alter the mental state. At first, no one had any idea how they worked. They simply blunted disturbing mental symptoms. But over the next decade, researchers found that these drugs, and the newer psychoactive drugs that quickly followed, affected the levels of certain chemicals in the brain.” The NYRB discusses the epidemic of mental illness.
  • I don’t quite understand this, but it’s beautiful.
  • Finally, here’s an excerpt from a particularly smart Redditor, on why biodiversity among trees is important.

When you have a tree farm, you wipe out probably >90% of all of the species that live in something like an old growth forest, and the repercussions are huge. You’re essentially saying that the majority of life on earth isn’t important, and that all we need is oxygen and lumber from our forests, and maybe some Christmas trees. However, what you really get is a tremendously sterilized environment, and the loss of the diversity that leads to constantly better scientific understanding in fields like genetics, chemistry, medicine, biology, biomimicry, evolutionary processes and possibilities, and so much more.

And it isn’t just the loss of those species. It’s the loss of what those species might become. The concept of species isn’t just a what, but a when. All species are transitional, between what they evolved from, and what they will one day evolve into. Some may not, because they are optimal, and every mutation is worse and dies off, but many – probably most – always have room for improvement, especially as things like climate and neighboring prey/predators change through evolution or migration.

Speaking of trees, my friends Will and Brian climb the shit out of them. Big ones. Crazy ones. Ones in foreign countries and stuff. Will once guided me up a hundred foot beech tree in our front yard. It was amazing, but let me tell you: climbing a tree is hard. It’s really hard. You pretty much thrust your way up it — like, you quite literally fuck the air on your way up the tree. That’s how you propel yourself. Anyway. Just thought I’d give their project a plug. It’s pretty damn cool.

2

I’mma Let You Finish, But These Links Might Be the Hottest Links of All Time

By
Tom OHare
– June 2, 2011

You know what has probably never been joked about before on the Internet? Kanye West interrupting Taylor Swift several years ago at some awards show no one cares about. You know what else? I’m gonna give you some links. Unlike last night I have nothing better to do tonight other than rage on the Internet, so I’ll likely be back later to, you know, rage and stuff — but here is something that will, at the very least, get the word “Weiner” off the top of the page. Hmm. Victim of the fallacy it seeks to correct, that last sentence there. Whoops.

A real shame, if you ask me.

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Here Are Some Goddamn Things To Read

By
Tom OHare
– June 1, 2011

Quick hits, because it’s been a long day and I’ve got better things to do than rage on the Internet:

  • Here you will find a physicist discussing whether or not this shot was real. His conclusion? Inconclusive! (But it was real.)
  • Here you will find Matt Yglesias unconvincingly trying to justify his support for the Miami Heat in the NBA Finals. (I’m sure somebody at LG&M will be on the case soon enough, so you can read it there.)
  • I guess Sarah Palin and Donald Trump had lunch somewhere and people on television pretended to actually care, which made people on the Internet care, which means I had to read about them caring, which resulted in the singularity, which we’re currently undergoing here in Massachusetts by listening to the rest of you fucks get swallowed up. Y’all sound like thunder when you get swallowed. (Just so we’re clear, time and space work all weird-like during the singularity. Also, no link for that one. You’ll just have to trust me.)
  • Did the New York Times hack Goldman Sachs’ ‘Fabulous’ Fab Tourre? Oooh! Intrigue at the link!
  • Is it ever okay to double dip? NOT IF YOU’RE A RECESSION, IT ISN’T!
  • Finally, Weezer covered Paranoid Android? Wha? When did that–? Anyhow, it went okay. (On second thought, here’s the video. Sorry, Kottke, you get enough traffic.)

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