Sweating the small stuff

Megan really has been on fire this week. Let no post go unshorterized, semi and not so shorter.

Dark Knight is great: You heard it here first: Remember folks, when talking about someone whose tragic death you blithely mocked, make sure to use lots of inappropriate constructions.

And what about Heath Ledger? ... But I wouldn't be indignant if he walked away with [the Oscar].
...
The only movie I've ever seen him in was "10 Things I Hate About You" (yes, yes, I've never seen Brokeback Mountain). I mostly knew him for being extremely pretty. So I was surprised to see him be so good in an adult movie.

The comments to this post are a treat.

Her voice sounded like money . . .:

It's odd that an entire American accent disappeared virtually overnight: the upper class American accent that covered not only the northeastern seaboard, but California as well.

It wasn't an accent, it was an affectation. It went away because most of my parents' generation realized how fucking stupid it was. One of my aunts had that accent, despite neither my grandmother nor any of her other children having it, and I'd mock her but for an unwillingness to speak ill of dead relatives.

Ground Zero: If you build it, they won't come:

When we started talking about what to rebuild at Ground Zero, there was a strong faction urging us to "build them back, taller" or some variant thereof. As many of you know, I started this blog when I was working down at Ground Zero for one of the recovery company [sic].

Yes, Megan, and "Live from Ground Zero" was a classy, tasteful choice that was not at all potentially offensive to anyone. And yes, you knew people who died. Tell us about that again. No one else knew people who died, it was your national catastrophe.

Tall buildings don't work that well--above about fifty stories, the elevators needed to transport the people start crowding out the usable office space. This is why the WTC had those ridiculous "sky lobbies" where you had to change elevators to get to the top floors.

Actually, no. They were there for efficiency, but Megan's ownership of 9/11 and related topics retroactively changes that fact. She cannot be wrong, she worked across the street.

It seems to me that it's time to rethink the whole project of putting more office space there, and turn the area into a national monument. If you're worried about losing commercial space--though this is hardly a current issue for New York's beleaguered financial industry--there are green spaces and low rise in the surrounding area that could be bought with eminent domain and built up.

Fuck the parks used by the people now living down there, drawn by incredible rent subsidies in the years immediately following 9/11, let's maintain a huge chunk of downtown real estate as a memorial to death, so that jingoistic conservative politicians will always have a backdrop for their speeches accusing their liberal opponents of not having sufficient blood lust. Hell, why not let Bush move his Presidential Library there?

Grow the hell up, internet: (I know it's been covered, but I want a crack at it, too.)

I've been thinking recently about the tendency of bloggers and commenters to take a post they don't like and say "I don't even need to bother to refute this because it's so self-evidently stupid". No, actually, you do. That technique may have worked on the C String of the high school debate team, but it hasn't since. What that statement screams is "I can't refute it, and it's a really good point, so I'm just going to assert that I don't need to and hope you don't realize that I'm an idiot."

Having been criticized by a variety of feminist blogs, Megan can no longer dismiss her critics as misogynists, so she needs a new tact tack (doy). Now she's going to tell all the people calling her an idiot that they lose because she's declaring "no calling me an idiot" and that's now a rule so hahahaha.
But wait, you say, she is an idiot, and a hypocrite.

There's a lot of idiocy on the internet that I, like every other blogger, look at, recognize as unbelievably flawed, and toy with the notion of refuting. Then I realize that shooting fish in a barrel isn't really very much fun, and annoys the fish, so I go find something more productive to do. This mental scenario is repeated millions of times a day by all of your favorite bloggers.

So you're allowed to think someone is an idiot and dismiss them in your mind, you're just not permitted to say it out loud. Be polite, people. (Also, "shooting fish in a barrel... annoys the fish" is a wonderful Meganism. She can't even use cliches properly.)

The thing is, when I encounter someone whose argument really is so boring that it isn't worth refuting, I don't refute it. I don't link to it. I don't say anything about it, because I feel my readers probably have enough idiocy in their lives. If I link someone, I am conceding that they are worth arguing with--that their argument is worthy of refutation. This is what intellectually confident people do. Only people who are pretty sure they can't win try to claim a moral victory--the blogging equivalent of standing at the Olympic starting line and saying, "Well, I could outrun everyone, but that's so obvious that I needn't bother getting my shoes dirty."

When half a dozen blogs point and laugh at Megan, they look foolish for lowering themselves to the level of noticing her. Also, they lose, because they didn't take her argument to jail the Jena 6 seriously and respond with carefully considered positions.
Additionally, the fact that she repeatedly misspells the name of a blogger whose name is in the chunk of text she then quotes, while claiming to like said blogger, in no way is indicative of why Megan finds mockery to be her most common response.

I'm thinking of declaring August "Grow the hell up, internet people" month. Who will join me in my crusade?

Megan is, like, soooooo much more mature than all you baby 6th graders internet people. Her boyfriend is a high school freshman, and they've gone to second base. Like, grow up.

Megan smells.