Take away her pills

please.
I'm begging you.
The shit avalanche just won't stop. Instaputz sent us a note of condolences, it's so bad. I feel I'm overusing the format, but the only way to tackle this is shorters.

Tax me more: Nope. Not reading all that. Not gonna happen.

Even if I werent't a (temporary) vegan,:

I'd think almond milk in my coffee was pretty delicious. It has about as many calories as 1% milk, it's creamy--not like nasty soy or rice concoctions, which are good only for baking--and it tastes deliciously of almonds. A huge improvement over hyper-sweet syrups (and if you like it sweet, just add your own sugar or Splenda.) After Lent ends, this is one innovation I'll keep.

Well, M., you have your answer. She's vegan for Lent, which definitely means the leather is still in play. I hear that next year, for Lent, Megan is going to pay a guy to stand alongside her yelling out false complements for passersby to hear.

What do voters want?: I think Megan McArdle is a vampire. It's the only explanation for her lack of self-awareness. She cannot self-reflect because she cannot see her own reflection, thus she never developed a proper concept of the self, and mistakes the entire world as an extension of her being. If you think I'm stretching, then find another way to explain this

The problem is, voters bore journalists. Not because we're elites and they're proles, or we're smart and they're stupid, or however you want to frame it. Voters bore journalists because we are supposed to find out what they think about policy--and they don't, much. We, on the other hand, spend all of our time immersed in this stuff. Talking about politics with your average voter is, for most journalists, like an engineer trying to explain to his mother how a television set works.

If Megan wasn't a woman I'd physically threaten her in response to this. This kind of stupidity is genuinely lethal. This is the level of stupid that allows folk to say "now I'm not racist, but *insert racist assertion here*". Megan, by her own admission, only started paying attention to this campaign at the end of last August. In 2004, she voted for George Bush, and there were over 50 million common voter type people who understood politics better than Megan at that moment. Megan's unwillingness to hear criticism leads her to hellholes like this post, because if the problem isn't with her then it must be everyone else in the entire world.
There's a classic moment in the flick Broadcast News where Holly Hunter's boss sarcastically tells her "it must be great to know everything", to which she replies "no, it isn't, it's terrible" (I'm paraphrasing from memory). Megan, like most mediocre journalists, probably thinks she embodies this moment, without vaguely understanding its very simple message.

Farewell forever:

Like most Irish Americans, I have a sort of vague sentimental notion that the conversion of Ireland to an English-speaking nation is a linguistic and cultural tragedy. Like most Irish-Americans, I also would not want to actually live in a non-English-speaking nation. What I really want is to have learned Irish from my Grandmother, and be able to impress friends by ordering drinks in my ancestral tongue while on holiday. This is the sort of thing that makes my Irish friends complain--justly--that Irish-Americans would really like to see the whole country preserved as a sort of Colonial Williamsburg with shamrocks and twee wool caps.

"learn Irish"? Now, I'm heavily Scottish, so fuck you bagpipe stealin potato suckers, but is there a legitimate history of calling Gaelic "Irish"? I wonder if Megan romanticized the IRA back in the violent days. She is Catholic, and stupid.

Ordinary heroes:

A few months ago, I got an attack of vertigo in a bar, so bad that I couldn't walk. (It happens every few months) As I staggered out of the bar, having to stop and put my head between my legs every few steps in order to overcome the waves of nausea, I dimly realized that the friends I was with (both male), were informing everyone in the bar that I had vertigo. When I stopped being so sick, some hours later, I started being embarassed; I must, I thought, have looked like I was vilely, humiliatingly drunk. Was it very embarassing, I asked one friend.

"It wasn't because you looked drunk," he said; "You looked like the roofies had kicked in too soon."

Regrets . . . I have a few . . . but then again . . . too few to mention:

Obama's rhetoric about trade, and his insanely bad economic "patriot act" have certainly given me pause. But do I have buyer's remorse? No. For starters, I clearly prefer Obama to Hillary as president; on the assumption that there's a very good chance that Generic Democrat will win the election, the primary outcome suits me.

An outcome which, while it certainly looks very good for Obama, has yet to be determined, Megan's royal decrees aside.

Moreover, Obama is running left right now to try to win the nomination. I expect he will tack right in the primaries . . . and he will probably have to govern as the fellow in the general election, because that will be his actual mandate.

The Atlantic does not check the copy of its bloggers, Megan has proven this time and time again, but when she makes those small but grating mistakes I still get a bit depressed.

Crooked Timber » » McMuddled: I love you, Crooked Timber, really, I do, but you're too good for this. Megan is beyond responding to rationally. Like her fellow conservatives, she's created a bizarre alternate reality which, while she uses english words to describe it, has no correlation with the reality in which our minds and/or physical bodies exist. I realize that's a bit more extreme than saying she's prone to using the jargon of fields and concepts she simply doesn't understand, but I'm really coming to think there's something pathological here.

Clarification:

This does, however, raise an interesting normative point, into which I have now been sidetracked without quite noticing: should you, if you think that your taxes are too low, voluntarily give that money to the government? The answer, I think, is yes, for reasons that I've laid out in previous posts. But that is separate from the positive observation I stand by: people are more interested in levying taxes on others than they are in paying taxes themselves.

English major.

Time to stop being sober.