That’s an interesting view of “excitement” you got there…
Sigh:
David Brooks: Gail, can I draw you into the America versus Europe debate? This is the old argument over which model of capitalism is better, the Anglo-American model or the continental one. It was recently rekindled by two bloggers extraordinaire — Jim Manzi and Jonathan Chait — and then joined by our colleague Paul Krugman.
My own background on this matter comes from having been a Wall Street Journal editorial writer in Brussels for more than four years early in the 1990s. I was sent there to flog American-style capitalism into the natives. I came away convinced that the American model is in fact better, but it was useless to try to persuade continental Europeans of this fact.
I became convinced that our system was better not for the wealth-generating reasons the current bloggers are arguing about, but because it leads to more exciting lives.
Dude, there’s nothing “exciting” about not having health insurance or about going through massive financial crises. This sort of chaotic economic activity may get you off, but for most folks it isn’t a lot of fun.
Also, Europe has some of the best places to ski in the world. That seems like a much healthier form of excitement than, say, losing your child because you can’t pay for his medical bills.
More:
The continental model encourages less work at the cost of boredom. I knew people in Brussels who went to work at an organization at 25 sitting in one desk, and they could tell you exactly what desk they will be sitting in and what job they will be doing when they retire at 60 or 65. Yawn.
Yawn. No kidding. Clearly they’d be better off in the thrill-a-minute American economy where you get laid off every three weeks and have crappy unemployment benefits.
Getting fired at randomly or otherwise by a family member with a handgun is also very exciting.
Oh! The excitement!
The excitement of knowing you could be laid off or whimsically at any time!
The excitement of knowing you could be bankrupted by a not-even-that severe illness!
The excitement of selling worthless derivatives thereby collapsing the entire economic system!
The excitement of buying a congresscritter of your very own!
Gad, American capitalism just can not be beat for excitement.
…whimsically fired…
Brooks is already mega-rich. He’ll never be a victim of American-style capitalism. Of course he loves the stuffing out of it.
Being stuck in cookie-cutter suburban subdivisions with no way to get anywhere without driving and no community life to enjoy! The excitement!
Isn’t this America in the beloved 1950s?
Oh please, I could savor the excitement of starving to death in a box on the street in Europe, too, I’d just have to try harder.
there’s another problem associated with nitwit capitalism. It’s impossible to get really difficult things accomplished when there are so many social uncertainties. Ever wonder how Germany got so far ahead in green technologies? It’s because they practice a more sane, less “exciting” form of capitalism
You know what’s exciting too, David Brooks? Being shot at by insurgents. Why aren’t you volunteering?
I knew people in Brussels who went to work at an organization at 25 sitting in one desk, and they could tell you exactly what desk they will be sitting in and what job they will be doing when they retire at 60 or 65. Yawn.
And no one could have predicted that BoBo would be writing this piece of crap at 60 or 65, or however old his ass is.
Except that he’s been writing shit like this for years.
That Bobo would say such a thing surprises no one. It shouldn’t, anyway. Bobo has no fucking idea what excites Americans. No more than he knows what’s at Applebee’s. Nor, to be sure, what’s what with just about anything.
I love that opener. Gail, can I draw you into my wonderful, whimsical fantasy world? Gosh darnit, isn’t it exciting!
Unbelievable. These absolute assholes who live vicariously through other peoples’ pain – whether by getting them shipped off to war, or following their excitingly unsettled lives – are really the worst of the worst. I don’t believe in the concept of “evil”, but if it fits anyone, Brooks and friends are it.
In point of fact, using the word “excitement” in reference to anything related to or emanating from David Brooks is oxymoronic. That goes double for the man himself.
His essays often put themselves to sleep, for example.
I became convinced that our system was better not for the wealth-generating reasons the current bloggers are arguing about, but because it leads to more exciting lives.
An occasional ride on a roller coaster is alright, but I would not want to commute on one.
The continental model encourages less work at the cost of boredom.
WTF? No, really, WTF? I’d really like to lounge around the piazza drinking cappucino and ogling the belle donne, but that’d be boring… Again, WTF?
If you haven’t read the articlke I linked to, you really should. Not only is it a devastating takedown of Brooks, the devastation pocess explains him quite well.
I’m just saying because every time I point folks to it, they all say how great it is.
I’ve got it! We can have a Swedish-style cradle-to-grave welfare system that guarantees health, comfort, and a basic standard of living for everyone.
Then, instead of lottery winners getting the above, they will be shot in the face.
That way we can still have some excitement!
I misread the title “Boo-Boos in Paradise” as “Bonobos in Paradise.” Which would have been much more entertaining.
“May you lead an ‘exciting’ life”: Old Chinese curse.
Let’s legalize Tar and Feathering!
That would make America REALLY fun again.
Jesus.Fucking.Christ. Excitement? Fuck you you smug rich bastard. Somalia is even more exciting – why don’t you move there? I would take a nice secure boring job with a great safety net and a lot less Talibangelism any day of the week.
He should go spout his philosophy down at the unemployment office. I am sure there will be many eager listeners who will invite him outside to hear more…
Let’s legalize Tar and Feathering!
Are there no lions? Are there no Christians?
Hey, look! Working for free is real exciting too!
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2010/01/08/we-got-jobs-by-working-for-free-115875-21950954/
The vast, VAST majority of working people in this country and in Europe — let alone the rest of the world — don’t have “careers” with the potential for “exciting” leaps across the workplace or entire industries (with safety net conveniently provided by parents or a wealthy relative).
Instead, they have JOBS. And pressing needs other than “lifestyle changes.”
It sounds like Brooks has never actually met one of these exotics.
You know what also quickens your pulse? How about eating something that’s potentially contaminated with E. coli?
WOLVERINES!!!!GREEN ONIONS!!!!Another victory for Amurka and conservatism!
oooooooooooooooooooh
uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh
I feeeeeel myself beeing possesed!
Yssssss, channelling Broooooooooksssssssssss
“What are other peoples’ lives but amusing anecdotes for me to misinterpret in the most self-aggrandizing fashion possible?”
ooooooooh!
uuuuugh!
BLEACH!! I need bleach!
I knew people in Brussels who went to work at an organization at 25 sitting in one desk, and they could tell you exactly what desk they will be sitting in and what job they will be doing when they retire at 60 or 65.
You mean people had JOB SECURITY? Oh WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. Fucking shit, man. It’s not like they couldn’t quit their jobs if they were so fucking “bored.” Maybe they LIKED having the security that their jobs provided?
I’d like to see this motherfucker get by for a MONTH while living like the average American. And I’m talking, like, a $40,000 a year job, not even some dead-end job that keeps you in crushing poverty your entire life.
Although I suppose that if the best argument that a conservative can muster for our economic system is “Oh, come on! It’s EXCITING,” he’s liking cracking under the pressure of cognitive dissonance.
Or “likely.” Wev.
It’s shit like this from bobo that makes me pine for a horrible, slow death by some rare and exceptionally painful disease for this piece of shit masquerading as a human.
brooks is the ultimate glibertarian, “I got mine” know-it-all that, in reality, couldn’t tell you which was a hole in ground and which was his asshole without help from two personal assistants and possibly pollster or consultant.
In the end, I can only go back Douglas Adams for some comic relief, “…mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came.”
Or “likely.” Wev.
That’ssss ooookaaay. The Great and Powerfu Ramthar neeew whaaat yooooou meanttttt.
…
Yeah, I know a lot of people in America who have this exact same attitude toward their jobs (minus the confidence of job security). Some of them I call my best friends.
Most of the world’s population actually have this attitude toward work. We can’t all be ladder-climbers, or entrepreneurs, or smug, douchbaggy political pundits.
When I think of a life lived to the utmost, of an individual who takes the brio of living to new heights, who DEFINES exciting and dynamic, I think of David Brooks.
I have an idea of the route to success. But just what do you have to do to fail upward as quickly and completely as this guy?
As boring as those Belgians are, is he kidding? He knows and we all know what job he’ll be doing in thirty years: still typing crap from his perch at the NYT.
If a vegetarian likes eating vegetables, what does that make a libertarian?
The more deprived of liberty other people are, the more comparatively free I am, which is a social good.
We can’t all be ladder-climbers, or entrepreneurs, or smug, douchbaggy political pundits.
I bet those Belgies don’t even have a word for “entrepreneurs”!
It’s really easy to think it sounds fun when you don’t have to deal with it and you just get to bloviate a lame column a couple times a week, Brooks you p.o.s.
neo-liberal capitalism is so indefensible that even supporters of it have no argument other than ‘well, shit, its exciting aint it?’.
He lived in Brussels for four years and seems to have entirely missed the experience of being an upper middle class European.
They don’t live to work, they work to live. They LIKE all that relaxation time that is available when one eases off on the non-stop professional push that characterizes most American careers. They like their lunches, their wine, hanging out with friends and family. And not worrying so much.
And really, plenty of Americans would go that route too, if given half the chance.
So not only does Brooks have no understanding of the lives of the working class, he can’t even observe the most obvious facts of life of the folks he surely was rubbing elbows with for nearly half a decade.
Amazing.
Booboo Brooks don’t know from capitlism and exictement. Now here is exciting capitalism.
There are days when I’m ashamed of how much I hate some people. This is not one of them.
Y’all think that’s bad? Have you seen his column today on Haiti? The fail just smacks you in the face like hot and humid weather when you walk out of an air-conditioned building.
I’m getting tired of saying “this is the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever read” but, and, etc.
I’m sure anyone who spends any time around David Brooks ends up being really bored, which probably goes a long way to explain his assessment of Europeans.
Besides, if you have the internet at your boring job in Brussels you can surf the web and read a story about how proud some American guy is of his farts.
Seriously, someone needs to give Brooks and his ilk the excitement of, say, France in the early 1790s.
Ho. Lee. Fuk.
From b.g.’s Booboo link:
Words fail me.
What a smug, smarmy, vile, cretinous, oily, unctuous, glib, sycophantic, sanctimonious, preachy, artificial, little green shit of a human being.
And I too, read “Bonobos in Paradise”. Also.
yes, i have learned many fascinating things about the socialist hellhole that is western europe from my wingnuttia correspondants, who write me from inner fuckbrainistan, where everything is for the best in this best of all possible suburbs
first and foremost, of course, we know that any day now all of the socialist countries like germany, france, sweden, and england will go utterly broke and collapse. this has been about to happen next year at the latest since at least 1979. also, the health care is terrible since you need to camp out in a damp corridor for two years to even get seen by a doctor. the doctors don’t know anything anyway, and none of the equipment works, since socialism has sapped everybody’s inititive. and, to top it all off, the whole place is infested by moooslims, who reproduce at will and will surely administer the whole place via sharia law by next year at the latest. just avoid the whole continent!
then they jump into their volkswagon to go to buy some furniture at ikea, chatting away on their nokia cellphone the whole way. god bless good old american capitalism!
im still on a boat y’all
still on a boat
i got mine and im on a mothafuckin boat
go team obama!
There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile
Wingnut welfare spreads the same message as voodoo but in America, which makes it EXCITING.
In the neXt 40 years this guy,s office isn’t goiing to be relocated? Redecorated? Technology still to come won’t change the nature of his job utterly? Remember the typing pools of 1969 – I bet they’re all still doing the same job at the same desk. And this 25 year old at this desk hasn,t had it pounded in by a very good public education system that everything chnages?
David Broder expects people to believe in his bullshit made up anecdata? Jesus Christ what a dickhead.
There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious
You know what else gives people the idea that life is capricious? Having their entire country randomly annihilated.
More from Bobo:
The countries that have not received much aid, like China, have seen tremendous growth and tremendous poverty reductions. The countries that have received aid, like Haiti, have not.
AHEM
Comments are no longer being accepted.
The ass-whupping must have gotten to them.
Check out Doghouse Riley for a careful, thorough and slow evisceration of Brooks.
You-all know where he lives.
Hey PeeJ,
Regarding Brooks’:
What shocks me is: how is this different from the American Taliban and other Christian True-Believers? Is it a joke? America, like a few of the world’s richest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is this influence of the Christian religion, which spreads the message that life “is in God’s hands” and planning futile.
David Brooks: My own background on this matter comes from having
been a Wall Street Journal editorial writer in Brusselsan egg nog soaked tampon jammed up my ass for more than four years early in the 1990s.I became convinced that
our system was better not for the wealth-generating reasons the current bloggers are arguing about, but becauseit leads to more exciting lives.So that’s what’s left in the anti-socialism gun? It’s boring? We don’t want cradle-to-grave medical care, generous pensions, public education through college, family leave, because theyre not as exciting as casino capitalism? sheesh
I’ve been trying to flog the idea that driving would be much more exciting if, like older American cars sort of had with design elements, the center of the steering wheel had a bayonet sticking out pointed right at your chest, and then if periodically the brakes would automatically stop working, and then at random times the cabin would fill with smoke.
I fell out of the boat. Now I is sad.
Verbatim Bobo – so verbatim that it’s even excerpted verbatim into a little quote bubble to promote the argument:
BWaAAAhAHAHAhaahARGHFUCKINBOBOFUCKSHITDAMNASSFUCHhaha
Dear David Broder,
I appreciate your expertise on the topics of laziness and boredom, but holy fucking shit you motherfucking asshole. Even if the laziest and most bored person in the world was some europhaggortz, they probably got that way by reading your stupid fucking nonsense. You write what – maybe two different columns ever so slightly tweaked from week to week – ones that you have admitted to not bothering to getting facts right on. Just giving “general impressions”. Well Mr. David Broder you fucking piece of hypocritical shit completely lacking in self-awareness – my general impression from reading your bullshite is FUCK YOU!
Sincerely,
Dragon-King Wangchuck.
I haven’t looked at the archives recently, but I’ll be willing to bet that few pundits at the time of the New Deal’s regulation of the banking system so that we had no more giganto-collapses (that is, until Reagan’s deregulation of the Savings & Loan industry and the last few decades’ worth of Democrat-enabled but Republican designed & pushed deregulations) complained that, well, the United States would be so much less interesting if we weren’t continually risking panics and Great Depressions.
But I will grant that it has indeed been quite interesting these past 10 years.
Bobo is a progressive tree-hugger?
Jared Diamond to the rescue!!!
Ugh…I feel pity more than rage* at these sorts of people, because no one ever taught them to distinguish between fantasy and reality. Sure, we want our fiction to be exciting stories of overcoming the odds and carpe diem, etc., but life ain’t a damn story.
*The pity does turn into rage fairly quickly when the douche in question is making laws, instead of filling affirmative action spots at famous newspapers.
Recall the horrible tragedy a couple years back when that boatload from Brussels capsized mid-Atlantic, and all those hundreds of immigrants were drowned?
Me neither.
See, when famine and war makes it worse to live in Europe than in America, Europeans flock to these shores. When living in American is worse than living in Europe, they don’t.
I’ve been trying to flog the idea that driving would be much more exciting if, like older American cars sort of had with design elements, the center of the steering wheel had a bayonet sticking out pointed right at your chest, and then if periodically the brakes would automatically stop working, and then at random times the cabin would fill with smoke.
I’ve never done this before, but holy crap you just won the entire damn Internet with this comment. Hee!
Of Brooks, there are no words. If that asshat has ever missed a meal (except perhaps for the time he went to Applebee’s hoping to eat from the salad bar) I will eat my own shoes. Until he has gone hungry, or watched a loved one die from lack of health care, or slept in a refrigerator box under a bridge, he has absolutely no right to lecture anybody else about the virtues of “excitement” as an economic motivation.
Speakinf of innovation, hey Bobo – remember me laughing my ass off at you for getting EVEN FUCKING BASIC FACTS TOTALLY WRNGO and then BASING YOUR ENTIRE FUCKING ARGUMENT ON BULLSHITE THAT AIN’T EVEN FUCKING TROO?
Fuck You Broder.
The European model encourages less work at the cost of boredom.
All that legal weed, top-notch booze, and late-night clubs filled with pretty nineteen year olds? BORING!
Shorter David Brooks:
“I’m a man and farting is an important part of my masculinity.”
More bald-ass Bobo making shit up that don’t mean fuck-all.
percentage of population that is dirty immigrants
USA = 12.81%
France = 10.18%
Sweden 12.3%
Ukraine = 14.7%
Oh yeah, real big fucking point your making there. Incidentally, Socialestest fucking Canuckistan? 18.76%
Fuck You Broder.
Um, DKW? I’m a bit unsure of your feelings in this matter. Could you elaborate?
Could you elaborate?
Yes.
Fuck. David. Fucking. Broder. WithABrokenBottleOf CheapMezcal.
If David Broder were to get hit by a car driven by Novakula risen from the grave, I’d try to help Novakula flee the scene of the crime. But only after getting him to run over that insufferably sanctimonious idiot one more time. Then I’d p00p on Broder’s crippled and spasming body. No wait – first I’d go get some slightly rotten meat made into burritos with extra hot sauce, which I would eat with several cobs of corn – and then I’d carefully keep emergency crews away from Bobo for hours so they couldn;t move him while I digested the demon meal – and then I’d p00p on the jerkwad. While singing “For he’s a jolly good fellow.”
I would have stayed in Germany after I got out of the Army, in the 70’s, if I wouldn’t have gotten kicked out! The States sucked back then, too. Way too much Dick Nixon going on.
Having won the internet, life is now boring, so I will be attempting to row across the Pacific using only a raft formed from used bookstore copies of Atlas Shrugged and oars made of Freedom Fries.
copies of Atlas Shrugged and oars made of Freedom Fries.
This is the only way to reach the mythical lost continent of Libertariana.
El Cid, if life is too boring for you, I have some fascinating investment opportunities I’m just dying to let you know about.
Hey Matte,
I always wonder… Liberia already exists. Why didn’t John Galt just move there?
I think David Brooks needs to be forcibly given the exciting experience of being held under water until he drowns, and then being resuscitated, and then drowned again, and then brought back, again and again and again until he loses all memory of existence before his constant, unending drowning. Won’t that be fun!
Sentences That Must Have Been Fun To Write, Part MDCLXVIIII:
“You can’t snap your fingers and make it happen just by magic,” John Holmes* said. But he promised, “We will do it, slowly and surely.”
*Actually the U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator.
Now I know why I like it so much in the boat.
The loathsome thing begins innocuously enough, lulling you with stock mouthings of “I HAZ A SAD” over how bad those poor Haitians have got it, & then KAPOW! Suddenly you’re up to your eyebrows in Campbell’s Cream Of Dumbfuck without either a spoon or a snorkel – & it’s Campbell’s Cream Of Dumbfuck with a best-before date sometime in 1997.
PROTIP: skip to the comments & look for the person who’s from Haiti pwning Bobo with the greatest of ease.
Being a helpful soul, I’ve come up with a plan by which Mr. Bobo can maximize his personal excitement level at only a fraction of the cost of
Russian RouletteFree Market capitalism:1: apply blindfold while standing in the middle of your back yard
2: throw lawn-darts straight up as hard as you can
3: ??????
4: PROFIT!
Gratuitous Horrifying Imagery: I’d bet good money he’s got an anal tattoo that reads “Welcome To Wikipedia.”
PS: on my Firefox, the Coakley post above this one is normal, but all others have their right-hand margins bleeding off under the right column … it might just be my ‘puter being ideosyncratic but I thought it was worth mentioning.
The defenders of American capitalism were recently crying about how the increase in minimum wage last year negatively affected the unemployment rate – the teenage unemployment rate. It seems that we can’t pay people enough to eat or else teenagers will have a harder time finding a job. I bet these same people are really dissapointed that the pre-teen unemployment rate is so high.
When I lived in boring Holland I was never once served in a fast food restaurant by a teenager. I asked coworkers if their kids had afterschool jobs and they were disgusted at the idea. Kids did homework, played football and generally had fun after school. How boring their lives must be.
I sure don’t miss the six weeks annual vacation I had in Holland either. Talk about boring. Everyone takes four weeks in the summer to go to France or Germany and then two weeks in the winter to go skiing in the Alps. God it’s boring.
D-KW,
You do realize the subject is David Brooks? Not David Broder, who is, admittedly a slimy asshat. But sheesh.
Pooping on Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Broder, do you even need a reason?
PS: on my Firefox, the Coakley post above this one is normal, but all others have their right-hand margins bleeding off under the right column … it might just be my ‘puter being ideosyncratic but I thought it was worth mentioning.
jim, you are hallucinating backwards. Via Chrome the Coakley item is the one that’s effed up, & the other posts are OK. Seriously.
Anybody else hear Bobo on NPR today crying big salty tears about that mean old proposed Bankster Tax? “I have investments in the stock market,” quoth Bobo. “I suppose that makes me a bad guy?” This was followed by a thudding silence during which I swear I heard EJ Dionne thinking Yes, you fucking tool, yes.
Ah Brooks, is this how you concede defeat when you know you’re licked?
I bet life was pretty exciting in Stalin’s day too, you never knew who the voices in the boss’ schizophrenic head would tell him was plotting against him and needed to be liquidated. It might be you, it might be your boss, which would mean a big promotion!
The comments and the power he holds over our discourse and media make me hate him, but it reveals just how much the type of fucktard who champions these conservative ideologies really do live horrible lives, because of it.
The type of rich fuck that becomes a David Brooks or a Rush Limbaugh or a Pat Robertson is sitting on piles of money. Enough money that whatever life one wanted to pursue, one could do so freely without ever so much as raising an eyebrow or scrambling for subsistence.
But they lock their own lives from themselves in what they can’t do or pursuing more wealth or trying to find meaning in their lives by vicariously “enjoying” (like Brooks) or seeking to dominate (like the Christian Right) the lives of others and they end it so bored and unfulfilled. Look at Limbaugh miserable to the bone even after all the Dominican boy hookers and drugs or Brooks who clings to this system because of the imagined excitement in his head vicariously lived through others.
I wonder what happened that they fell so far from the fact we more liberal types quickly find and grasp, which is that meaning is something we bring to life rather than the other way around and excitement is wherever you want it in various hues and easier to find and enjoy when one has the stability to pursue dreams and whims.
In our hands their fortunes could be put to so many uses, either personally exciting and uplifting or beneficial to humanity in general so that more can have the security to enjoy more of their lives than before, but instead thanks to a collusion of people like Brooks, it ends universally in the hands of people who look at it in raw confusion that the simple pursuance of such wealth didn’t automatically grant the possibility of excitement or meaning.
It’s sad until you remember that these fucks then turn around and take it out on us for the world not giving them the meaning and excitement they “earned” through their acquisition of wealth.
It is also horrifyingly revealing that Brooks seems to believe that meaning should come solely from one’s job. While it is indeed true that liking or enjoying one’s job and career on it’s own merits is a highly rewarding thing that can reduce a lot of tensions and stress, he seems to be entirely ignorant of even the very notion that there can be such a creature as “free time” where one can go and “enjoy themselves” with all manner of excitement in whatever flavor one personally chooses.
While I understand most of it is propaganda seeking to continue to reassure Americans that they should be happy to think of themselves as nothing more than a disposable cog in a meaningless machine, I wonder if some of it isn’t a result of such propaganda working on him as well.
If he’s married, I shudder for her and pray she is enjoying herself some fine exciting affairs with his money, because I can’t imagine living with someone for any amount of money who had no concept or appreciation for even the idea of downtime or who would never even consider giving his life meaning or adventure outside of work.
_When_ is karma going to wipe that smirk off Brooks’ face and plunge him headlong and screaming into reality? I’ve detested his passive-aggressive “got mine, fuck you jack” attitude for a long time, but with this piece and his Pat Robertson-lite ed. on why Haiti is doomed unless they give up voodoo and go back to colonialism-sponsored-by us, I actively hate him.
And what is with Gail Collins that she hasn’t smacked this bastard up one side and down the other for his ignorant-ass, ghastly-smug inconclusive conclusions? Why does she tolerate him?
Cerberus, they are empty people. Crapping on others is the only way they can find any satisfaction.
Dunno what you did to whack the template, but the only way I can read the posts here now are to reduce the text size to an illegible microscopic size, and c&p it into textpad. The text is overflowing underneath the sidebars.
.
You want excitement? Go buy a monkey!
What between this, the hundreds of similar things I’ve read in the last half-year or so and now the David Brooks deal, I think I’ve finally run out of steam.
There are no adequate words to describe how nauseating it is to be lectured by people sitting on piles and piles of money measuring things like health insurance, retirement security and ensuring the basic necessities of life in terms of “excitement.”
It’s not a fucking game, David. Maybe you can afford to see it that way, and maybe there are still thousands of middle-class Americans who are deluded enough to think they can, too. But the poor and working class aren’t laughing, and a lot of the middle class isn’t either. This is their lives that people like you are playing with as thoughtlessly as a kid burning ants with a magnifying glass. Just once, I wish you’d step out of your self-contained me-me-me dimension and think of it in those terms, instead of spending all your time worrying whether our penis is still bigger than Europe’s.
My own background on this matter comes from having been a Wall Street Journal editorial writer in Brussels for more than four years early in the 1990s. I was sent there to flog American-style capitalism into the natives. I came away convinced that the American model is in fact better, but it was useless to try to persuade continental Europeans of this fact.
Not only did they laugh at his futile, paid whoring, they insulted him with such wit and erudition that he thought they were flattering him, until one European took pity on him, and explained their many jokes at his expense.
At least, that’s my explanation for his psychopathy, but your mileage may vary. Now, how do we get him to the next natural disaster, five minutes before it hits? He needs that excitement, really he does. And we need to watch every last minute of his few and feeble self-help efforts, should he actually have the stones to try. Laughter, after all, does the heart good…
You do realize the subject is David Brooks
Umm, yes – previous slip notwithstanding. Sometimes I get their last names mixed up, but we’re talking about the pastel shirted jackass who after getting caught out in having said things that were demonstrably false claimed that it didn’t matter because the point was for him to get across the impressions he observes. Teh Dean just ignores all contradictory evidence and gets his fawning press corps to exile you into the land of hte Unserious.
Brooks is a fucking idiot. Sure he occassionally barfs up a column chiding the US for not doing enough on the environment – but that’s only because he’s scared shitless of Hte Yellow Menace. Seriously, climate change for Bobo isn’t about a world-wide disaster that will devastate human civilization – it’s about keeping ahead of the enigmatic Chinese. So even when Brooks and I agree on the ends, I still can’t stand the fucking jerk.
“I became convinced that our system was better not for the wealth-generating reasons the current bloggers are arguing about, but because it leads to more exciting lives.”
So Mr Brooks has access to research showing that all Americans – or maybe Americans on average – have more exciting lives than Europeans.
I’d love to see his original data.
Of course, Brooks knows not what he writes. What could have been more exciting than to live in Europe from, say, 1914-1945? Okay, now, sure, it’s somewhat less exciting, but there’s always the Balkans.
“The continental model encourages less work at the cost of boredom. I knew people in Brussels who went to work at an organization at 25 sitting in one desk, and they could tell you exactly what desk they will be sitting in and what job they will be doing when they retire at 60 or 65. Yawn.”
Isn’t that a good thing? Having job security and being paid well enough that your not stressing out all the time?
And I would argue the point about less work causing boredom. The people is most European Countries get 6 weeks a year off and make enough money where they can take a Holiday (to the dim-wiitted, it means vacation). You don’t hear about people going yo work with an AK47 and shooting the place up, after all.
No one goes Postal there.
What an idiot. He’s been a Villager for far too long.
I haven’t read all the comments (watching The Boy right now), but one thing struck me about that quote–but not the part about excitement.
If’s a fucking travesty of karmic justice that anyone treats either this fuck or the WSJ seriously — especially after his accidental admission here:
So … he finally admits he is not someone who comments with facts, reality, or even basic competence about the issues of the day but, rather, a fucking propagandist.
Admitting a problem is the first step.
Just 11 more to go, Bobo … 11 more to go …
What could have been more exciting than to live in Europe from, say, 1914-1945? Okay, now, sure, it’s somewhat less exciting, but there’s always the Balkans.
Or, you know, Haiti, which he also excoriates. That Haiti column is a real piece of work, for certain excremental values of “work.”
I’ve been in the workforce for 31 years, and I’ve spent about 30 of them worrying that my job was about to be wiped out. David Brooks can take his “excitement” and stick it up his smug ass sideways.
Since his wife’s real estate holdings tanked in value, Thomas Friedman’s life must be more exciting now, by Brooks’ calculus.
Schaden, meet Freud!
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