Really, Megan?

Figurative Curb-Stomping:

I notice it much more on left wing sites, but that's because I basically refuse to read angry right-wing sites, so I don't know what's going on there.

Can not soil her precious mind w/ any of those angry right-wing sites.

It's one thing to be angry; it's another when anger is the main force that binds a group together. Call me a vaporing language nanny, but I thought it was pretty creepy when Jon Chait described another liberal journalist, Michael Kinsley, another journalist, as "curb stomping" economist Greg Mankiw for, yes, daring to suggest that higher marginal tax rates might have incentive effects. Woo-hoo!

But why stop with curb-stomping? Wouldn't it be fun to pile ten-thousand gleaming skulls of supply-siders outside the Heritage Offices?  We could mount Art Laffer's head on a rotating musical pike that plays The Stars and Stripes Forever!  Then, in the most hilarious surprise ending of all, the mob could turn on Jon Chait, douse him with gasoline and set him on fire, and then sack the offices of the New Republic!

Somehow, that's not actually funny. Neither is curb stomping, as Ezra Klein pointed out.

When anger binds a group. Tea Party, anyone?

Actual curb-stomping, & not just men shoving each other, falling down & moaning.Here's an angry right-wing site that thinks this is the funniest thing since, we'll guess, Emmett Till.

Do the Kentucky Head-Stomp!

Posted on | October 26, 2010 | View Comments

It’s the dance sensation that’s sweeping the nation:

How many of your mealy-mouthed words are these pictures worth, McArdle? Who's angry here?

Let's Have A War! And Maybe Another One, Too!

We're sure McArdle fans have seen the ginandtacos item wherein Mlle. McA.'s firm beliefs vis-a-vis the invasion & continuing occupation of Iraq are deservedly mocked.

Settling for scraps, I went to the source, & noted this bit that no one else I've read has yet mentioned.

Thus, Eric Alterman is enabled to claim that the cost to the US taxpayer will be over $2t, even though most of the larger costs cited by Galbraith aren't going to be borne by Americans either directly or indirectly, but by Iraqi oil.⁶ That's the oil that will be able to flow freely for the first time in ten years because of this war -- and the revenue from which will flow to the Iraqi people for the first time in a decade.

The footnote:

⁶ Am I suggesting that the Iraqis should pay for occupation expenses? Nope. We can afford it, and there's something repellent about making impoverished Iraqis pay for a war foisted on them by an evil dictator. But most of that $2t, if it is any sort of a real number, will be stuff for Iraqis: roads, schools, hospitals, government buildings, power plants and sewers and all the good stuff that lets us live like citizens of the 21st century. That stuff should come out of Iraqi oil revenues.

Our emphases. She knows from "real" numbers, doesn't she? And how's all that "get the oil money to the Iraqi people" worked out, seven yrs. into the occupation? More electricity, to run all the "good stuff?" Well, no.

What a horrid, awful, fucking bitch. From what dark, disturbed part of her ugly mind did something like: "there's something repellent about making impoverished Iraqis pay for a war foisted on them by an evil dictator" come? Foisted on them? Or is she referring to Bush when she types "evil dictator?" The "foisting" was done by people like her, stenographers for the unelected gov't. of the usurper Bush.

Elements of Style©: How could a graduate of Podunk State Normal School, let alone an English major from Penn, type "stuff" twice, & "good stuff" once, in any context, let alone in two sentences?

And an outro from DougJ at Balloon Juice:

Doubt this will make it into Conor Friedersdorf’s li'l round-up of mistaken Iraq War predictions.

Probably not. Fuck Friedersdorf, & the horse he rode in on. Remember this?

Tell us, Friedersdork (He really shouldn't type under his own name.) how's that True/Slant site where you used to type working out for ya? We still exist. You got fucked by a corporation. Learned anything yet?

If he's still on the "under your own name" thing (What possible difference does it make? Malignant Bouffant isn't anyone else's name, & it bloody well is my own name.) he can shoot me a fucking email, we'll meet somewhere, & just before I cram his teeth down his throat, I'll let him know what my legal name is, & who's a "coward."

(Really, what is he talking about? Should I reveal my legal name, address, 'phone # & other contact info to prove something? Something along the lines of how many hateful lunatics read McArdle & would try something physical if they knew where to find me? What's your address, Conor, if that's your own name? It isn't, of course, it's his parents name for him, & like the pathetic sheep he is, he accepts it, along w/ the conventional wisdom he swallows whole. Asswipe.)

Shame: Not At Work Here

We see that McArdle has copped David Weigel's one-time WaPo end-of-day link dump title.

More Megan On Mortgages: "Jerks"

They mis-spell her name.

Heh heh. As Yahoo! won't let me embed the video (Yes, it's important to see these people as they blather.) you'll want (Sure you will!) to go right over there to see & hear.

Hey, waitaminnit!. "Nobody" doesn't conform to The Narrative of Barney Frank, the homosexual Jew, sending his ACORN & SEIU "thugs" to force banks to lend to colored people!! I demand a recount or something!

In Which Ms. McArdle Continues To Stick Up For Banks

And I continue to mock her, merely by copying selected parts of her items. Not taken out of context at all. (It's the Interthing, you may click directly for full context.) No, selecting just a paragraph or three isolates the more offending parts from the general noise & froth & allows focus on the inanities that glazed eyes may miss.

Banks need to be taught a lesson for their stupid lending It all sounds very emergent and spontaneous and Hayekian: a nation of freelance bank regulators. Every man his own bankruptcy judge!

All well and good, except that if you are walking away from a mortgage simply because the house is underwater, you have no authority to punish them. After all, the reason it was stupid to lend money to you is not that they were lending money to someone who probably couldn't pay it back; you can. The reason that it was stupid to lend money to you is that you're a deadbeat--a foolish deadbeat, who thought that house prices are a magic route to free money. That's not something they could reasonably have been expected to know. Also, "banks need to be punished for being almost as stupid and greedy as I am" doesn't have much of a ring to it.

No, the bank would have had no reason to know that "you're a deadbeat--a foolish deadbeat," because all that the banks had to say on the subject was to be sober, save & not take out any second mortgages because the bubble was about to burst. Remember?

Suggestions on reconciling the bold title part w/ the rest of the typing here are solicited:

Companies act like faceless automatons, so we should too.  This is not actually true.  Imagine a bank that actually did only what is specified in their contract with you, and not an inch more.  That would be a bank you'd like a lot less than any existing bank, and with good reason.  They are restrained by various norms, and competitive pressure.  This is not to say that they always behave well.  But they do not, in fact, simply live by the letter of the contract, and if you think they do, I invite you to read me the part in your contract where they have to provide a customer service person who speaks adequate English and doesn't burst into violent profanity when you ask for a mortgage modification.

Moreover, the way to punish them for behaving badly is either to regulate the bad behavior, or refuse to patronize banks that behave badly, not to simply walk away from your house loan.

You just sit there & hold this bag until we get those regulations passed & enforced, or until a too-big-to-fail institution goes under because it behaved so badly there was a run on it. We'll be right back.

And The Chances Are Good ...

Still waiting.

"There's a good chance that I will take a nap and then head out to our nearest Wal-Mart to blog it for you"

And sad.

UPDATE (29 November 2009 @ 0025): Nothing yet.

Up to the Hilt in Missing the Point

"Why is This Bubble Different From All Other Bubbles?" Megan asks. Someone wrote a story about how wealth creation should be centered around making actual wealth instead of cardboard houses hours away from any urban center and Megan goes all "That doesn't make any sense! Let me put on my thinking cap and think a hole through their argument!" Well, there's a hole in something. We do, as usual, marvel at her decision to properly capitalize the title. She does do brief flings with minimal competence.

James Surowiecki has a very interesting column arguing that this bubble was different because unlike the earlier banking booms, there was no point to the wild spending. The bubble didn't bring us railroads and electrification; it brought us . . . houses. Lots and lots and lots of houses.

I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, I think that this is an interesting point. On the other hand, of course, the bubble in the 1920s was not limited to electric stocks, or even stocks. Lots of money was wasted on railroads, Florida real estate, mining concerns, and many other unrelated phenomena. And if you look at the history of the 1920s, you see the same thing we see in the 1998-2008 era: markets awash in too much money.

This is a stellar fucking point. I'm sure Surowiecki (Whose name can be only cut and pasted, not spelled correctly on a whim) was thinking as he wrote this article that all previous bubbles were based around only one stock. It's like those crazy people that say crack had something to do with the crime rates of the 80's. What they don't realize is that other, non-drug related crimes were also committed in the 80's so crack obviously had nothing to do with anything.

Megan seems to fully fail to comprehend the expression "irrational exuberance" and can not understand why a reasonable increase in one sector might fuel reckless optimism in all sectors. All booms show markets expanding rapidly in many areas. The question is what fucking PRECIPITATES that expansion. When it's the advent of the personal computer, well, it's a bit less retarded than when it's the belief that houses will double in price every 10 years no matter what.

So I wonder if there isn't a sort of post-hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning to these "explanations" of the previous booms and busts. A market bubbling over wtih too much credit will end up plowing a lot of money into some technology or industry which ends up being really, really important twenty years later. (The electric revolution continued, surprisingly rapidly, in the 1930s). We look back and interpret the bubble as having been "about" that technology. But at the time, when it's not obvious what the big winner is going to be, it just looks like a giant mess.

That last little bit is almost certainly how the people who hired Megan are feeling right about now, assuming they feel things.

The Dickipedia pages for her little foray in the dead language says this:

Post hoc ergo propter hoc, Latin for "after this, therefore because (on account) of this", is a logical fallacy (of the questionable cause variety) which states, "Since that event followed this one, that event must have been caused by this one."

So either she's arguing that it was a coincidence that rapid expansions preceded booms and were concomitant with the introduction of technology that radically increased productivity or she doesn't know what the fuck post hoc blah de blah means or when to properly invoke it. That is, she is not arguing that what goes up must come down, but rather coming down is a naturally occuring phenomenon which happens without warning, regardless of height. Things flat on the ground have been known to come down spontaneously all the fucking time. While there is apparent correlation between being up and then coming back down, this does not imply causation. It is certainly possible to come down without having first attained some height above the ground. Ipso facto QED E pluribus unum, BITCH!