September 11, 2004

WTF is wrong with David Brooks?

Seriously.
How can anyone who writes shit like this be considered a legitimate media figure?

Rich people don't vote Republican much, much more often than they vote Democratic because of some aesthetic preference for numbers. They vote Republican because the Republican party is the party of business and the wealthy.

Furthermore, what the hell is the "postmodern, post-Cartesian, deconstructionist, co-directional ambiguity of Kerry's Iraq policy", which can be summed up by the word "internationalize"? Maybe the problem is that Kerry's plan exists, so an infinite number of predicates may or may not apply to it; but since Bush's plan doesn't exist, it's easy to determine which predicates apply and which do not.

Finally, as someone heavily involved in both "hard" and "soft'" academia (and is he actually contrasting the difficulty, or whatever, of econ, business, and mathematics with English, history, and philosophy?), there is no loathing going on, natural or otherwise. Except me, of David Brooks' fantastically terrible reasoning.

PS Mathematics is as populated by liberals as any other academic discipline. Generally speaking, you can tell a professor's political affiliation based on whether they are economists or business professors. For christ's sake, Brooks even admits this like six paragraphs from the end!

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