Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Back to the Grindstone, Part II

eff the foreplay.

Thought for the day:

Us stupid humans don't understand how frustrating it is for a higher life form like Megan McArdle to have to deal with us.

Assuming that we are indeed facing, in large part, a crisis of confidence, would this crisis be solved more quickly if we stopped nattering about the banking system and simply burned us some witches?
Blaming people for the mistakes they've made = horrible persecution. Megan constructed a self-serving hypothetical..... ummm, pretend logic proof that doesn't involve logic to prove it. She used capital letters like X and Y and Q and everything. QED, bitches.

A for effort:

Nutella touched on this one, but I'd like to draw attention to some of her words.
The purpose of a grade is to show mastery (or not) of some volume of material. Is it fair to set the bar higher for me than for someone who isn't as capable? Or vice versa? Is it fair to send the signal to employers that I wasn't up to scratch even when I did objectively better work than some other student?
Not comprehension, mastery. And the personal turn is just... mwwwah!
Megan thinks she got Bs because she was sooooooooooooo inherently awesome she was being graded on a different curve than the mere mortals around her in a fucking Ivy League school, as opposed to her work was mediocre compared to her classmates who were there on merit and actually trying. No, it's the old Randian truth that inherent superiority as a person is a drawback in our crazy screwed up world.

Sign of the Times:

In case you missed it, Megan followed a google alert that her name was used on the interwebs to Dhalgren's place, (Hi Ann Althouse! I'm not you!) and decided to do her whole fakey kill em with kindness act. I'm not sure it had the effect Megan wanted, as Dhalgren linked to us in his first sentence, and FMM got a mention or two in the comments, leading to a substantial bump in traffic. I don't care, but it's nice to know it'd irk Megan.

Law for law's sake:

This post is comically desperate. Megan is trying to get people to link our natural distaste for lawyers with her bootlicking toady desire not to regulate the financial doings of the masters of the universe.
FEMA couldn't send all the trailers it purchased for Katrina victims to the gulf because of rules about deploying mobile homes on floodplains, and it couldn't deploy them to help tornado victims in Arkansas because the affected area wasn't big enough to be an official emergency disaster zone. So instead the trailers rotted in storage.
Geez, stupid regulations prevented the government from doing that in the middle of hurricane season? And those trailers were pure awesome, not at all having problems with formaldehyde fumes and asbestos. There are no flaws, whatsoever, in Megan's example here.

I wonder how Megan felt about Jindal's speech last night. She's probably upset and confused by the negative response from all quarters. She laughed about volcanoes with him. Isn't Alaska cold, anyway? They should be glad for the lava giving them a chance to go out to the beach.

1 comment:

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