Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Meganball

The madness of crowds:

I have a general rule for debates: he who loses his temper, loses. His supporters see him as righteously inflamed by the moronic arguments of the other side. But the rest of the audience sees him as bully with a case too weak to be made without screaming.
(Note the gender of her pronouns.)
Meganball is kind of like Calvinball, only the rules aren't internally consistent. The only constant is that Megan wins, no matter what.
I take a topic on which I myself have been known to be intemperate: vaccines and autism. Both sides can get nasty. But the anti-vaccine crowd is generally the crowd that stops making arguments.
Even when Megan does it, the other guy did it first.
Next she extends this 'rule' into the debate on the stimulus plan. Because Megan doesn't actually have an argument against the plan besides it makes her feel vaguely icky to be helping people, the flaw naturally rests in how stimulus proponents talk to her and BFF Tyler (and his hair).
The one thing I can say is that the tendency of the proponents to get angry at anyone who questions them, and/or pick on side points, does not make me more confident in their judgement. It doesn't seem to me like the irritation of confidence. It seems like the anger of someone with something to hide.
"The irritation of confidence"? As in someone being irritated by a putative economics pundit repeatedly conflating a bailout and a stimulus to the point they have confidence said pundit is a blathering idiot with no idea what she's talking about?
That must not be it. One of the more frequent rules of Meganball is that her mistakes prove you wrong. I dunno, I guess we just have to accept we lose, because we aren't special like Megan.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have a general rule for debates: he who loses his temper, loses.

What a conveniently vague and shallow rule. The amusing thing is that by Megan's reasoning many of the great political writers and orators of Western history - Demosthenes, Cicero, Mary Wolstonecraft, Robert Ingersol, Malcolm X, and so on - had actually lost most of their debates. If only they knew of Megan's wisdom!

Anonymous said...

I have a general rule for debates: he who loses his temper, loses.
====================================
I'd imagine Megan's debating rule is created thusly:

1) Megan doesn't have any command of the facts or the logic of the issue in question.

2) Her opponent becomes exasperated, and angry, with Megan's confident vapidness.

3) Megan Wins!
~