I've been thinking of making a "worst of" post with a permanent link over in the left hand column, any suggestions?
Don't worry about it being too obvious to mention, I try my hardest to forget what Megan has written after mocking it.
Think spectacularly wrong and/or spectacularly shitty, like Dude, where's my recession or Jail the Jena 6.
Update:
Lots of suggestions, thanks all. My aim is a non-exhaustive list of the truly, unambiguously cringe worthy moments during our watch for relative newcomers to peruse. The 2x4 has to be mentioned despite predating us, of course, and I'm surprised no one has brought up "people who get something wrong therefore know more about the topic", yet. I'll take a week or two to build a list and throw up something preliminary for further input then.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
So
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How about her callous treatment of the death of Heath Ledger?
Your Google polls & scripts keep me from opening this site at work, so I'd hate to see them replace by something that doesn't freeze IE.
I would nominate "Bus thoughts" from 1/19/09. I'm not sure if you even covered it here, but I found it to be one of the more appalling and ignorant things I've read from MM.
This is the one where, in an apparent effort to gain some personal perspective on the civil rights movement, she concocts an historically inaccurate fantasy in which she puts herself in the shoes of "the white man who tried to take Rosa Parks' seat." And guess who she ends up sympathizing with.
Money quote: "I mean, we've all fantasized about being able to do it, on a bad day--to somehow steal a seat from someone who couldn't need the rest as much as our puffy feet."
A recent classic with all the standard McArdle cliches present: Narcissistic, a false premise, thinly veiled racism, empathy for the powerful, etc.
I bet dollars to donuts SoT remembers some good ones. She has a knack for that. She just recently brought up the whole "forgot to vote" and "unregistered car" follies over at Alicublog. Good times.
I'd help, but I too push that shit out as far as I can get it as fast I can do it. Maybe something will trigger me later.
Oh, wait, black people are lazy. That one was awesome. Wasn't the topic SAT scores or some shit?
Anything she's ever written about sports. Everything she's written about the subject has gone straight from her ass on to her blog. I can't find the post, but there was one in particular where she explained to us all that the reason why athletes' salaries have risen so dramatically is because fans are willing to pay more for tickets. She just picked a subject she knew nothing about, applied 11th grade, day one, Econ A principles to it, and *poof* out comes her stupid, ignorant "explanation." FAIL.
Good idea, but Megan beat you to it. She's publishing a Kindle ebook with the favorite posts of her readers.
I'm sure if you send her an email and ask nicely, Megan will include your choices (I already asked for the 2x4 post).
How about the one where she bitches about all the idiot drivers who won't get out of her way when she's riding her bicycle to work? I really liked the one where she reported that, due health issues (i.e., kidney failure I think), she--regrettably--had to give up being a vegan. The vegan tofu recipe still makes me laugh, especially if you consider her idiot commenters who rave about how good it must taste. Forgetting to register to vote? Hilarious.
But overall my pick is, Due to the Inherent Failures of Government, I Can't Get My Mini Registered in DC Because I Blew Off a Criminal Conviction 20 Years Ago. That's idiocy for the ages. The fact that her own mother smashed into her brand new car is icing on the cake of idiocy.
Oh, that's right. The recipes. I remember those. They were all stupid.
Then, later, she told us taht she learned to stop taking her critics personally when they made fun of her recipes. She thought the whole thing petty, I s'pose.
Then she stopped writing recipes. Wonder why?
Actually, some of the entries might have to be a series.
Ooooh, the recipes! When they weren't bland and pointless, they were flat out TERRIBLE. She clearly knows nothing about cooking, but inexplicably wrote about it as if she did. Classic Megan thinking she's so much smarter than everyone else that she can put on these pretenses and nobody will notice that how clueless she is.
And you could have a "answering the critics" category, breaking it down into "it's because I'm a woman" posts, "you just misunderstood my point" posts, etc.
At this rate, you'll basically be cataloging her entire blog.
Come on, her entire opus is the worst of. Trick question/poll.
The ones about food, fat and food stamps. The one Gleen Greeenwald wrote about, ignoring torture.
The macaroni and cheese post was a major classic. My favorite part was when she told us that New York foodies all cooked this way.
The article in which she explained that the rich are more moral.
The Jim Cramer/Jon Stewart post.
The Freedomworks posts.
Damn, you really would end up with half of her posts.
Oh oh oh, don't forget her "the doves were wrong, too!"
http://www.janegalt.net/archives/009590.html
I'm blocked from the jane galt archives.
I think there was some weird bug. Try cutting and pasting the link in a new window or perhaps restarting the browser.
Does anyone know her origin story? I saw some mention of a post about why she became a libertarian in college, but I can't find it. I bet it's gold.
My favorites were the posts about pancakes, her gift lists, and anything involving her car. These aren't good candidates for a special section, but they were such great examples of Megan's narcissistic assumption that everyone on the internet was interested in the pedestrian details of her daily life. I especially liked when someone here or on her site pointed out that complaining about having to drive 50 miles or more to find a Mini dealer to change her oil didn't make much sense when all she had to do to avoid the inconvenience was buy a different car from a dealer closer to her house. Megan can't seem to apply her own lectures about market choices to her own life.
It gets more ridiculous than that. For some reason, she bought her car from someone in Florida.
That's an ambitious project, but would be a very worthy addition to the blog.
I have to vote for the posts on the Lancet Iraqi civilian deaths study. As I recall Megan tried her best to play the part of statistician and got fried. Didn't she lock horns with Glenn Greenwald over that study?
BTW - look at Glenn's columnist power ranking. You won't find MM on this list (not in the top 50 anyway, I've been too lazy to look at the bottom of the list).
Oh crap, she's # 22. Hence the need for this blog!
It's personal for me, but I'd vote for her post on gay marriage. It's arguably the best instance of her trying desperately to take a centrist, "I'm so above these partisan squabbles" position and still coming across as a doctrinal conservative.
Dhalgren,
If I'm reading those rankings right, the bloggers' influence is being measured by traffic and inbound links. In Megan's case, it doesn't account for how many people are linking and visiting just to marvel at how much she sucks.
"I'm sure if you send her an email and ask nicely, Megan will include your choices (I already asked for the 2x4 post)."
I'm sure she'd include all of the "can't you liberals take a joke?" posts (i.e. "waiting overnight for an iPhone is exactly the same as being a refugee") without a shred of irony.
It's already been mentioned twice, but I vote for the 2x4 post. It's her defining moment as far as I'm concerned.
The 2x4 comment is how I found out about Jane Galt to begin with. That has to be # 1 in the hall of fame.
But there are so many others. The Doves Were Wrong, Too ranks highly, as does the criticism of the dirty hippies who weaken their case through the use of profanity. That would be us here.
And any post about the cost of living in her hometown, Da Big Apple.
Waiting for the iPhone, 2x4, Dudewheresmyrecession et al. certainly deserve to be up there. But the two dearest to my heart are the one where she couldn't tell the difference between nuclear fission and nuclear fusion and the Christmas post on the kitchen stuff. A holiday classic for the ages, if you ask me.
Oh! The gadgets! I'd forgotten them, too, somehow. Man, this is the best thread over.
Ah, memories.
And the post about make-up, where she defended her subject choice on the grounds that Mark Twain once wrote about cigars in the Atlantic. Then she proceded to describe the contents of her make-up bag in a manner that would have shamed the lowliest intern at Cosmo Girl! magazine.
What makes the insanely long gadget posts classic is her later admission that she personally gets a monetary kickback from all those Amazon links.
And wasn't there one where she was lamenting the commercialization of Christmas, and then immediately followed up with one of those epic length gadget lists?
It took a juicy question to set the record for most comments to a single post ever here at FMM.
The one where she tried to get a Sears repairman was classic.
Every time she tries to do something practical, hijinks follow.
And the I-Work-16-Hour-Days post.
It's non-stop atrocities. We'd never be able to document it all.
McArdle is too big to fail!
I think you're going to need a special category for Megan's wedding posts that she said she wasn't going to write. Who was it that predicted she would slip in wedding posts by thinly veiling them as related to economics? She's doing it already.
Probably ranked F-list at best, but the series of posts where she insisted she was "evicted" by her landlord when all he did was exercise his right to not renew her lease was pretty amusing.
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