I want to be rid of Megan tabs in my browser.
Holiday Gift Guide: Girl Stuff:
Believe it or not, I'm something of a girly girl. I like high heels, makeup, and loving rituals involving gentle exfoliants and moisturizer. Having been told that this makes me look unserious, I have refrained from putting up this sort of guide in past years. But applying makeup is no more unserious than playing video games, and, one might argue, is at least as much fun. So: the official Megan McArdle guide to girl stuff. If nothing else, the trolls will enjoy sniffily declaring that this doesn't belong in the same magazine that published Mark Twain, (you know, the one who wrote lengthy essays about serious topics like cigars).Again, plz beat her up, Susan and CP.
She compared her post to the work of Twain. I hope The Atlantic ceases operations very, very soon.
Medical prime:
The insurance companies have just as little incentive to fix the problem. After all, if it's hard to find a doctor, and your doctor makes you wait a long time for your appointments, you use less healthcare. Brilliant, eh?But the solution isn't for the insurance companies to change, but for already too rare and overburdened nurses to take up even more of the primary care responsibilities.
Oil falls below $40 a barrel:
The stock market isn't looking so hot either. Both are essentially guesses about the economic future. And the guess is pretty grim.Wow, she noticed the Dow Jones has lost about a third, give or take, off its peak average. I'm proud of her.
Does Megan calling things grim mean it's worse than that, and we're going to end up zombie cannibals in ruined wastelands?
Bet Ron Gettlefinger is kicking himself:
Bush weighs "orderly bankruptcy" for the Big Three.Aka fuck the unions and pension obligations, pay the rich people.
This is the option that's always seemed to make the most sense to me.
And we're caught up. Yay and shit.
Do you think exposure to reality would cause Megan to melt like the Nazis at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie?
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8 comments:
Mark Twain, (you know, the one who wrote lengthy essays about serious topics like cigars)
Oh thou of the Shure headphones and Krups coffee grinder, dost thou really wish to invoke his name?
"As concerns tobacco, there are many superstitions. ...
The next superstition is that a man has a standard of his own. He hasn't. He thinks he has, but he hasn't. He thinks he can tell what he regards as a good cigar from what he regards as a bad one--but he can't. He goes by the brand, yet imagines he goes by the flavor. One may palm off the worst counterfeit upon him; if it bears his brand he will smoke it contentedly and never suspect."
Thanks for the Twain fix, bulbul. It never ceases to amaze me how skilled he was - taking a topic as inconsequential as tobacco and turning it into high art? Find me another author who can do that. I can still remember the first time I read...
...oh, what? Right, Megan.
The root problem with McArdle is not that she is shallow, unprofessional, incurious and out of touch. It's that she's aware of all this and doesn't seem to think it's a problem. She's become so convinced of her own skill that she no longer considers her faults to be faults. Ergo, she feels no need to improve herself. Her writing has not gotten any better - if anything, it's gotten worse, with these meaningless holiday posts being the topper on a year of late posting, thoughtless filler, factually incoherent debates with people more qualified than she, and gratuitous spelling and grammatical errors.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I must go and read the War Prayer to cleanse my mind.
D,
my pleasure :) "Concerning Tobacco" is my one of my favorites by Twain, especially because I happen to be a cigar smoker.
Ergo, she feels no need to improve herself.
Which, as Slacktivist argues, is not only all the things we know Megan is, but also immoral.
One thing that bothers me about all these "holiday gift guide" posts, beyond the fact that they're filled with meaningless garbage that no caring person would actually buy a loved one, is that the products are mostly linked via her Amazon kick-down site. I don't mind people having those accounts. Hell, I never buy anything from Amazon without clicking through by way of a friend's links to their own. But a little disclosure that she's making money off of people wandering in that way would be a professional courtesy.
And D -- "incurious." That is the perfect word for Megan. She's interested in the shallow appearance of being smart without actually making any effort to become smart by learning about things. I'm still amazed by the number of people that fall for it, considering how often she just pulls things out of thin air.
CP, aren't journalists--and Megan really, truly believes she is one--supposed to avoid conflicts of interest as part of their ethical duties? Isn't it a conflict of interest to hawk overpriced consumer goods to your readers by personally vouching for the products' virtues--without disclosing that she's taking a cut? I really wouldn't have a problem if it was the Atlantic that was getting Amazon's kick-back. But that fact that Megan's doing it--and that she doing it to such an extent--really bothers me.
Let me put it another way. Do you really think that lazy-ass Megan would be posting her Holiday gift guides, which probably take a lot of work to put together, if she wasn't personally getting duked a few bucks from Amazon? At my office I'd get fired if I was doing what Megan's doing.
The worst part is that people don't even have to buy what she's hawking. If they hit on any of those links and wind up navigating to another part of Amazon from any product she's listed and buy something else, she still gets a kick-down from that purchase as well.
And I'm pretty sure she would have listed her gift guide even if she wasn't making money from it. Status is very important to her, so she'd still get something out of bragging about all the high-end electronics she owns and the fact that she can blow fifty bucks on a tin of face powder.
Do you really think that lazy-ass Megan would be posting her Holiday gift guides, which probably take a lot of work to put together, if she wasn't personally getting duked a few bucks from Amazon?
Some of the commenters at Alicublog pointed out that Megan's list is, in fact, extremely lazy. We're not exactly talking Consumer Reports here - comparing prices, reporting on features, product quality, etc. All she does is walk through her house and say "Oh! That's nice. Let's put that on the list."
Plus, every shopping post takes the place of a post on the economy - a topic on which is truly unqualified to comment, something that becomes more obvious by the day.
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