(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Fisking David Brooks, failed critic of the professional-managerial class [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-08-10

Via LGM

I bit the bullet and subscribed to the NYT. Let's fisk this POS (the linked piece, not David Brooks)

"Donald Trump seems to get indicted on a weekly basis."

Let's begin by distorting the reader's sense of the passage of time.

"What’s going on here? Why is this guy still politically viable, after all he’s done?"

Let's invent a credulous state of mind, as if the reader does not have a mind with a habit of consuming news. While reading a freaking David Brooks opinion piece.

“Republicans see a world changing around them uncomfortably fast, and they want it to slow down, maybe even take a step backward. But if you are a person of color, a woman who values gender equality or an L.G.B.T. person, would you want to go back to 1963? I doubt it.”

You're just paraphrasing William F. Buckley, noted anti-anti-John Birch Society bigot, then going even further into political revanchism, and then you're implying that oppression exists, and I guess human beans are human beans, I guess. Go watch Pleasantville on repeat, you POSes.

"In this story, we anti-Trumpers are the good guys, the forces of progress and enlightenment. The Trumpers are reactionary bigots and authoritarians."

And the people you just quoted someone else about, the demographically oppressed? The ACTUAL POINT of this entire article? They don't exist anymore in your telling. Because your audience would prefer to treat them as obsequiously servile servants and not think of them as human beans.

"I partly agree with this story, but it’s also a monument to elite self-satisfaction."

I don't think I've ever seen a man screw himself in the ass so earnestly before. Impressive, like my Wordle today!

"So let me try another story on you. I ask you to try on a vantage point"

I'm gonna go with 'take advantage' and 'I don't have a point #seinfeld' being subtexts of this word choice here. Let's see what happens!

"This story begins in the 1960s, when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam but the children of the educated class got college deferments."

#fortunateson #bonespurs #dipshit

So is this entire shtick just someone pretending that Rules For Radicals (there's a trip down Memory Lane) doesn't exist and pandering to the Have A Little, Want More class?

"The ideal that we’re all in this together was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here and everybody else is forced into a world down there."

#welleducated #froginthewell #frogsallthewaydown

"Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves."

It's almost like the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house! #audrelorde

"We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement."

Interesting gimmick. You talk to a specific audience, (conservative anti-Trumpers) then pivot to using 'we' to inculcate hate-readers like myself into identifying with shit. This is some critical race theory level bullshit right here. Really good job demonstrating that conservatives in general lack empathy and the ability to relate to others when it goes against their greed and epistemological ignorance, David! (Can I call you Dave?)

"Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation."

Too bad many millennials are worse off than their parents! But Davey boy doesn't have to concern himself with anyone whose existence would dispute his one-man human centipede act.

"Meritocracy blocks the middle class from opportunity."

Classic failure of causal analysis. The idea that some people have advantages over others is sub-toddler knowledge. The *cause* of increased competition, instead of living giddily with the spoils of war as the US did after emerging as the only global superpower after WWII, was globalization. Maybe you and Thomas Friedman should form a two-man human centipede act, Dave.

"During his presidency, Barack Obama used the word “smart” in the context of his policies over 900 times. The implication was that anybody who disagreed with his policies (and perhaps didn’t go to Harvard Law) must be stupid."

Or maybe he was making puns about 'intelligence' and the spy network that exists in our country as he oversaw the NSA develop whatever the hell it does. (Doing the kinds of things that are done in the private sector in Japan, as I always like to plug in conversations.) I mean, that's an alternate hypothesis, isn't it?

"Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession; we’re an elite-college-dominated profession."

Again: the pie got smaller. People just started circle-jerking because the number of available jobs was vastly exceeded by the number of qualified candidates. The amount of virtue signaling rather than economically relevant skillsets is so overwhelmingly defining of the world today that TikTok was invented by China. Finally, the US doesn't have the monopoly in defining tech culture with market capitalization of like $10 million per employee or whatever.

“Those who manage to squeeze through the stem of a few prestigious colleges and universities in their youth can then branch out to fill leadership positions in almost every vocation.”

This is true. But, to provide a insight that is meta, do you know how this phenomenon is even more true? FROM 50+ JACKASSES NEVER HAVING TO ADMIT THAT YOUNG PEOPLE COULD DO THEIR JOBS BETTER THAN THEM, MUCH LESS RACE, GENDER AND THE REST OF THE -ISMS. LIKE YOU, DAVID BROOKS.

“[E]lite graduates monopolize the best jobs and at the same time invent new technologies that privilege superskilled workers, making the best jobs better and all other jobs worse.”

I could be rewatching Network right now. Christ on a cracker.

"Once we find our cliques, we don’t get out much. In the book “Social Class in the 21st Century,” the sociologist Mike Savage and his co-researchers found that the members of the highly educated class tend to be the most insular, measured by how often we have contact with those who have jobs unlike our own."

So much bad use of 'we'. A dipshit centrist's calling card.

But the more important detail is that maybe they're insular because they're highly sensitive people and would prefer not to be burned at the stake by people who are less sensitive and are pedagogically inculcated with the sentiment (not knowledge, even if it were true; David Brooks is bullshit-peddling) that their violent rage is justified by people like David Brooks. Just a thought.

And obviously, David Brooks, himself, is a highly sensitive person. He might lack self-awareness of his sensitivity, though.

"Open immigration makes our service staff cheaper, but new, less-educated immigrants aren’t likely to put downward pressure on our wages."

Open immigration? Great callback to shit that never happened, Dave. Granted, immigration policy is always awful as a matter of the philosophy of nations (diplomacy), but you're doing a good job of pretending that 'the educated elite' aren't pressured by H1-B visas. Besides the ability to just outsource coding. #playerpiano

"Using words like “problematic,” “cisgender,” “Latinx” and “intersectional” is a sure sign that you’ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears."

I will now do David Brooks the honor of acknowledging that left-wing dipshits exist, and that I at times have been a left-wing dipshit. It happens! We live and learn.

"Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired."

This would only be true if you're unable to form human relationships with your betters in some relevant respect who happen to be lower on a hierarchy than you. You know, EMPATHY.

"For example, there used to be a norm that discouraged people from having children outside marriage, but that got washed away during our period of cultural dominance, as we eroded norms that seemed judgmental or that might inhibit individual freedom."

This is the same amateur armchair psychoanalyst horseshit that's trying to reinvent psychoanalysis as anyone else doing the fair and balanced gimmick does. And, uh, it's horseshit.

Oh, and now as I finish reading, I see that this is 1500 words (ish?) of PMC bullshit. You could have done a better job for the world by linking Lewis Black. You actually made the world a worse place, David Brooks you racist, really ugly duck. Congratulations!

"We can condemn the Trumpian populists until the cows come home, but the real question is: When will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable?"

Never. It's called human nature. Read some goshdarn Terry Pratchett and go change a poopy diaper, you riddickulous, alphabetically-privileged horse's ass.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/10/2186430/-Fisking-David-Brooks-failed-critic-of-the-professional-managerial-class

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/