Beneath it All

We got some real good laughter going on about McMoron, our beloved Morbo informs us. Even fellow libertarian Angry Bear is calling her a goddamn idiot. Apparently she's arbitrarily getting her panties in a bunch about some mortage crap that I don't give a fuck about. Something something she's dum then she shows up in comments and says the following in defense of her position:

McMegan
Sigh. The point was that the product was created with heavy government interference/subsidies, not that the CFPA should be keeping banks from making loans they want to make.

Then there's a pile on:

Susan of Texas
Using that logic we should not use the internet, because it was created with "heavy government interference/subsidies." Yet, here we all are, voluntarily buying the service that others voluntarily provide.


Downpuppy
Or highways, railroads, piped water, sewers, electricity, airports...

Granted, highways have had some fairly ugly consequences, such as Houston suburbs.


Mcwop
And global warming.


Rob
Sighhhhh. Banks only exist due heavy government influence.


ilsm
Central banks are a threat to liberty, just like standing armies.

Libertarians are opposed to manipulating money, whether by the government or by a semi (hardly) independent federal reserve.

Do prepayment penalties make small banks want to sell the notes to big banks? And does the prepayment penalty make fannie and freddie bigger? and is that the libertarian angst against prepayment penalties?

Also are libertarians agnostoc pacificists, not being against war just the instrument of war? Or do they just want Cincinnatuses around to drop the plow and save the republic, which is so small as to not need saving..................?

ilsm will not change

I am no libertarian.

ilsm will not change

Oooooooooooooooo, just shy of the goal line, huh Meggers?



SIGGGGGGGGGGGGH. I think I'm in love.


Update: It occurs to me that I saw (in what little of this I did read) her mention that the 30 year mortage thing she's complaining about became popular in 1945ish, or somewhere just after WWII. So apparently it's such an insidious, lurking evil, it lays dormant for 70 fucking years or so.

Seriously, I just jizzed my pants.

Update2: AHHHHHHHHHHHH. i'm fucking hyperventilating, here. In the comments to her own original post she says:

I, too, am in the process of applying for a 30-year fixed . . .

Oh lord, I hope she gets her divorce soon so that I can marry her next.

Is There a Dumbass in the House?

Megan picks the weirdest things to opine about. I'm not sure if she's trying to be edgy or if there is some secret personal reason for each of the topics she espouses on, but the only unifying thing I can find is that she's stupid on all of them.

Perhaps her recent foray into best medical practice is motivated by her multitude of chronic aliments. Whatever the cause, we can say for sure that Megan knows better.

She starts with a long excerpt of someone else's writing. The veterans will not need to be notified that it is quite a bit longer than her own musings, though no less well informed.

And so, NICE has decided, on the basis of "the evidence", that acupuncture and chiropractic are a good way to spend the NHS's money.
(...)
As Edzard Ernst points out, the Cochrane Institute (the other great temple of evidence-based medicine) actually found chiropractic to be more or less useless, while the evidence for acupuncture is that all of the ancient wisdom and theory of the meridians and qi doesn't actually confer any great benefit over and above that which can be gained from simply lying on a table and being poked with sticks.

I see. So one investigative body says that chiropractors and acupuncture work, and another does not. Naturally, since those two things aren't "modern medicine" this is proof that the skeptics are right. Also, the fact that both report that acupuncture works is central to his point. The real problem here is the acupuncture works even if you're doing it differently than is commonly done, proving that acupuncture doesn't work and is total bullshit.

The rest of the excerpt extols on how medicine is complex and so we can't know anything for sure. This is both insightful and proof that we know for sure that acupuncture and chiropractors are crocks.

Now we get to Megan.

This is part of a broader problem with medicine and other sciences with physics envy. Medicine, like economics, is really messy. You can't do the same kind of controlled experiments that you can do on rats or quarks, and as a result, the results are often hard to interpret.

Hmm, you can't do experiments in medicine? Wow, those MD-PhD's are gonna be pissed to find out they wasted a decade of their life pursuing the impossible. I Love the analogy to economics, too. We all know that studying individual ailments and studying the complex interactions of millions of people are roughly equivalent. That's why medicine and economics have both come out with so few concrete improvements for our day to day lives.

But this doesn't stop doctors, or policymakers, from acting as if the studies or metastudies can deliver vastly more certainty than is possible from such inherently sloppy science.

Which is why our muse calls herself an economist.

This is why, for example, I am broadly sympathetic to Paul Campos' claim that medical guidelines on obesity tell you much more about the attitudes towards fat in the upper middle class social stratum that doctors occupy, than about reliable scientific evidence on same.

Right, the fact that medicine cannot produce reliable evidence is proved by the fact that medical claims aren't backed by the available evidence. The available evidence which cannot be produced.

But policy demands certainty. And so you get obesity guidelines advising everyone to diet and excercise to shed their excess pounds, even though it's as close to a scientific certainty as anything is that most people simply regain any weight they manage to diet off. And you get absurdly precise economic forecasting, even though in many cases, the better answer would be "who knows?"

It's not that Megan is wrong all the time. It's that no one can ever possibly be right about anything. Oh, and the fact that fat people have a hard time losing weight is apparently proof that being overweight is not detrimental to your health. Also, since most people don't lose weight no one should try, ever. Or something. She has a point. She swears.

In both cases, I don't see a better alternative. But we should be more skeptical of both the institutions, and their claims.

Oh, that explains her constant cheer-leading for the implementation of the things she just attempted to disprove.

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!

FMM Wins the Lottery-Megan McArdle Discusses Torture

Update:Just to be clear for anyone who might second guess; yes Megan was not originally anti-torture.

Megan's talking about torture. Read the post or just use your imagination. It's all the same.

I've long said that we shouldn't waste time arguing that torture doesn't work. For one thing, the evidence for those arguments seems empirically shaky, especially since many people employing them insist on arguing that torture basically never works, rather than that it doesn't work very often and therefore has a bad cost-benefit ratio. For another, arguing that something doesn't work isn't necessarily an argument for not doing it--it could just as easily be an argument for improving our technique. And if advances in brain scanning research let us develop a reliable lie detector, as seems possible in the relatively near future, then torture will work very, very well.

If that happens, we're in a nasty spot. Most people who make this argument do not, in fact, care whether torture works. They would still be every bit as much against it if waterboarding worked perfectly. Yet when they argue about whether torture works, they're conceding that torture's effectiveness is relevant to the question of whether or not we should engage in it.

(...)

Thus I think it is much safer to keep arguments about torture on solid moral ground: we shouldn't torture because it's wrong.

Megan's stupidity checklist:

Claim that opponent's arguments are invalidated by evidence she makes no attempt to cite: Check.

Claim that even if opponent's arguments are right, they are still wrong because of something that hasn't ever happened but could conceivably happen in a fantasy world that she periodically visits: Check.

Claim that opponent's response to counter arguments of her side undermines opponent's own arguments because their position is not based around her presumptions: Check.

Statement about her positions which matches none of her arguments and is clearly designed only to make her seem like less of a monster (Fat chance, bean pole): Check.

Oh, and, uh, dear, the people who supported torture don't get to become the "we" who are opposed to it later on. It's like how you don't get to be an Obama supporter when you never say anything positive about him, ever.

She closes with a long blockquote to which she offers no commentary (Check!). You can read it yourself, if you're looking for one of the lamest anti-torture arguments ever. Needless to say, the guy who wrote it is as shallow as you'd expect from someone that gets linked to by Megan.

He claims that the non-torturers won WWII (I guess the Soviets lost?) so torture doesn't work. He doesn't really back that up with any evidence of course, which is hilarious given how easily the argument can be made -- provided one makes even a cursory attempt to learn about spying during WWII. The espionage successes of WWII are almost certainly the best examples of how good intelligence can be without coercion. By the end of the war, German espionage in the UK was completely co-opted. Many historians believe there wasn't a single German spy that wasn't compromised to the point of uselessness, or an outright double agent. A man in Spain actually completely fabricated a network of English spies and convinced the Germans that it was authentic. He then used his imagined network to feed them false information throughout the war. There wasn't a single piece of information the Germans were getting through back channels that wasn't either wrong, or provided intentionally by the English.

This is one of the principle reasons that D-day was successful. Misinformation kept German reserves away from the actual landings because they believed they were only feints for the "real" landings coming at other locations. Naturally, these same double agents made gathering intelligence on the Germans relatively easy. It's pretty much a classic example of how easy it is to attract people to your side when your opponents are complete monsters. But of course, why would we ever want to win the hearts and minds when we've got so many bombs?

Note To Self: No More Sunday Pre-Coffee Posting

Between losing an hour & a hangover (idle speculation, that) Megan's Sunday a. m. post didn't go too well.

What they hadn't known, and indeed, couldn't really have known, was that the effect on Lehman debt would cause the value of a smallish money market fund aimed at institutional investors would break the buck.

I'd be interested to know what happened, or if "break the buck" means anything, but the sentence is confused & the link doesn't work, as of 1530 PDT.

Can You Imagine?

Worst sentence ever written in journalism?

The nerve of a typist who has to clarify herself every couple of wks. calling someone else on bad journalism or typing. Or anything else.

This gig is sapping my non-existent soul. At this point I can barely muster outrage.

Humor 101

Megan just doesn't get it, or, I must assume, anything else either.

Every time I see one of these things, I wonder.  Who the hell makes them up?  And why?  What do you get from passing your mediocre musings off as the work of a long-dead revolutionary?

So, Mlle. McArdle, you get no satisfaction from passing off your musings for money?

To what "mediocre musings" is she referring? None, really. Not "musings" at all, but an amusingly clever prank that may have put the fear of social justice in a few "traders." 

Laura of 11D says this quote is making the rounds of Wall Street.

Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalised, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism.

Karl Marx, Das Kapital, 1867

Megan wasn't quite sure what to make of this ("technology" was a good give-away for me) but after what appeared to be (Gasp!) research on her part & a memory-probe 15 yrs. into her mind, plus blather,* her only conclusion was "What's anybody get out of this?"

A. Good. Laugh, you poor humorless wretch. 

*Megastats: 22 lines by Megan, eight lines quoted. 

Morality The Megan Way

First we get this, from a long bit of rental advice for newcomers to the Quaint & Sleepy Village By The Potomac:

The inauguration rental ads in the wrong place on Craigslist are still going strong, but they've been supplemented by clearly fraudulent ads aimed at the Obama folks.  I came across this myself during our house hunt, when I randomly discovered that someone was advertising my mother's place for rent, at a ridiculously low price.  A friend suggested we try to play the scammers, which would have been fun and instructive, but immoral, given that other people on Craigslist might be taken in by the ad.

I have no idea what she means by "rental ads in the wrong place" or "play the scammers," but wouldn't one want to stop whatever scam is going on? Wouldn't that be "moral?" How would "playing the scammers" be "immoral?"

The morality of scamming the government is, of course, another matter to Megan.

* One of my favorite doctors was running a Medicaid mill, which I faithfully patronized when I was uninsured.  She was charming, caring, and merrily full of ways to help me milk the system, which I had to politely turn down and pay her in cash.  Given the reimbursement schedule Medicaid offers, I couldn't blame her a bit.

No moral question of turning in the "milk the system" doctor? Well, doctors are special people. 

Here, she reverses her usual "poor people are dirt who deserve what they get (or don't deserve what they don't get)" shtick:

It seems to me that there is no good reason for Medicare and Medicaid to be two separate programs. Housecleaners are surely no less deserving of decent medical care than Palm Beach retirees, yet we arduously separate the two programs so as to lavish extra care on the more affluent class of beneficiaries. It's no good saying that the Medicare recipient earned theirs through contributions, because they didn't--people in the system now are net beneficiaries, not contributors. It's just that on average they're whiter, they speak better English and their subsidized lifestyles are considerably better upholstered. I'm not sure why any of these entitles them to a better grade of publicly provided healthcare.

I'm in complete agreement w/ this "merger" idea (as a wig job on the gummint dole, I'm not even sure if I have Medicare or California's version of Medicaid, MediCal) except for the "people in the system now are net beneficiaries, not contributors" bit. Like, whatever. Are they paying? Have they paid? Just because they're getting health care out of the system now doesn't mean they haven't paid in. 

Spare me your fucking economics trickery. And your bogus, bourgeois "morality."

OT-Hijack-Bleg Just shoot me now I suck

Hey, Megan's being boring and I'm tired of dead end google searches and fruitless scans of blogrolls so here's my bleg:

Where the hell are the actually intelligent, not snarky, political blogs from ANY perspective? I really want to find an intelligent republican or libertarian blog (or anything that I'd disagree with) that isn't written by some partisan nit-wit because I like to challenge my own beliefs, but for all my searching I've never turned up crap

I'd also like a voice of reason from the left that isn't some douche bag who can't type and who thinks that pointing out that news anchors are stupid is a brilliant insight. I mean, alicublog and Sadly, No! are great for a laugh, but is there anywhere on the freaking net that has some substance?

Anyone who suggest Matt Yglesias or Ross Douthat gets shot in the face - fair warning.

I know. This post is gigantic lameness. I'll be extra awesome next time to make up for it. That, or I'll curse a lot. It's a toss up.

Do You Have Any Ideas Or...Oh, Just Forget It

Megan weighs in on the latest example of why humanity should be erased from the planet before it really hurts itself.

Except that she didn't say anything new, or do anything but explain the obvious to us. The quote from hilzoy ("Hilzoy views McCain's desire to allow Georgia into NATO as sheer madness:" Mlle. McA. can't even do a link properly. Miss, this is not your own crummy recipe blog for your galpals, it's supposed to be for the admittedly degenerate web presence of a once important & prestigious American magazine. Try to give two shits about it.) by itself would have provided a public service, but Megan's addition is just nothing.

Another way to look at the question is: are we going to allow Russia to reassemble the old Russian empire? At its heart, that's what this is about. Maybe we should; maybe it's none of our business who Russia decides to invade, or what puppet governments they decide to prop up, so long as they don't share a border with Germany.

I don't mean that sarcastically--I can make all sorts of arguments in favor of this attitude. On the other hand, it has obvious, dramatic costs, including the fact that Russia's imperial ambitions are unlikely to stop at the Georgian border.

Well, if you ask the question, shouldn't you make some attempt to answer it? Guess not.

If this war ends up with Russia occupying Georgia, NATO will probably be worse off than it would have been if it had let Georgia join--though to be sure, the US might still be better off. I don't know how likely such a scenario is. But it's been clear for a long time that Russia's goal is to regain its former imperial borders, effectively if not nominally.

That's it. Although the last time I checked (sometime after the break-up of Czechoslovakia) the United Snakes were part (& a pretty big one) of NATO. How NATO could be "worse off" (ugly, stupid phrase, by the way) but the USofA somehow in better shape is beyond this reporter. Especially as US foreign policy toward Georgia, as toward most of the states in Central Asia that have or are near OIL, is to send the US military to train their militaries, & then to sell them weapons & equipment while promising that the US paper tiger has their backs. The military-industrial complex is going to be losing client-states. Can't have that.

So, Megatron, do you have any ideas or suggestions? Where exactly do you stand on this? Yes, it's been obvious for a while to all but perhaps soul-searcher Bush that Putin & the new Russki P. M. want to be big men on the world stage again, but how are "we" to stop them, if "we" should at all? But Megan "can make all sorts of arguments in favor of this attitude," & apparently any other "attitude," w/o coming to any decision.

Do Not Tell Me I Am The Source Of Your Knock-Up. The Mud Elephant, Wading Through The Sea, Leaves No Tracks.

Once again, our heroine saves herself the trouble of coming up w/something clever & original by referring to another web log. (Not unlike the way it's done chez moi, but I digress.)

I've never had a baby, of course[.]

That goes w/o saying. (P. S.: We're all very appreciative of that.)

The interesting question he doesn't ask is what this would do to the politics of parenting.

By "parenting" she means "abortion." (Seriously. Read it.)

The minute you can take an aborted fetus and put it in an artificial womb, that argument falls away, and we get down to what pro-choicers really care about: not having a kid.

Ectogenesis must be pretty special if you can take an "aborted fetus," slap it into one of these artificial wombs, & it will come back to life & grow to term.

I can construct a libertarian argument for a right not to parent, but once the pregnancy leaves the sacred space of the individual body, both the logical and the emotional arguments get a lot weaker. What will society look like when unwanted pregnancies start turning, once again, into unwanted kids?

Can she "construct" (Betcha any argument McM. constructs would collapse in a heap of watery concrete & sub-standard rebar.) an argument for her continuing to pontificate for money? Or "deconstruct" (I know, not correctly used, but how can I resist?) this connection between the pregnancy (fetus?) leaving the woman's body &, well, anything? Does she mean pregnancy in general, having accidentally added the "the" there? Is there an implication that some future theocracy will require any woman who is pregnant to check the embryo/fetus in an artificial womb?

Or, in classic FMM style, what in the hell is she talking about?

Also sad to note: Mlle. McArdle received three times as many comments as the original item @ EconLog.

Russian Dolls of Incoherence

Megan quotes Arnold Kling quoting Marc Pesce who says:

Somewhere in the last few months, half the population of the planet became mobile telephone subscribers. In a decade's time we've gone from half the world having never made a telephone call to half the world owning their own mobile.

...fifty thousand years of cultural development will collapse into about twenty...each behavioral innovation is distributed globally and instantaneously...Any fringe (noble or diabolical) multiplied across three and a half billion adds up to substantial numbers. Amplified by the Human Network, the bonds of affinity have delivered us over to a new kind of mob rule...the more something is shared the more valuable it becomes...All of our mass social institutions, developed at the start of the Liberal era, are backed up against the same buzz saw. Politics, as the most encompassing of our mass institutions, now balances on a knife edge between a past which no longer works and a future of chaos.

Arnold wonders what this means for "educational and political institutions."

Megan wonders what this means for "social institutions."

I just wonder what the fuck it's supposed to mean at all. It's hard to think, though, with the sound of the buzz saw I'm backed up against. I'm also really tired of balancing on this knife edge. I wish I could get the past working and then maybe we could sort out the chaos over in the future.

God damn it, if someone would just turn the damn amplifier on the human network down I could maybe get a coherent thought going! How else am I going to stop the collapse of 50,000 years of cultural development? Am I the only one who realizes how important it is that we prevent the fringe from multiplying?!?!?!?!?!!!?! THE FRINGES ARE MULTIPLYING PEOPLE!!!!!!!!! DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS!??!!?!?!@?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!?!

Oh, well, neither do I.

I Just Learned a Neat Trick!

Wow, it turns out you can just make shit up about things you don't like and then insult them for it! Check it out!

Jane Dolt quotes a bit about a man who stole city buses just so he could drive them on their routes and pick up passengers. Then she cracks wise (grab your sides in anticipation).

Why are they charging this guy? It seems like they ought to hire him. If only so that he can get the therapy he needs through Miami-Dade's no-doubt generous benefits package?

HAHHAHAHAHAA! Look! I made a joke about government benefits based on pure speculation. If only she was near a computer with internet access when she made this blog post. Then she might've been able to look up said "benefeits package" and confirm whether or not her knee slapper is really a based on anything close to reality. Alas. It doesn't matter. We all know that the government is capital "S" stoopid for giving it's workers cushy perks like "health care" and "a living wage"

So now that I've got my new trick, I think I'll try it out. Megan McArdle is such a shitty incoherent writer that she no-doubt must be employing child labor to ghost write for her. HAHAHAH! Megan employs child labor! See, that's totally funny! All I have to do is say something absurd and attach it to some made up fact that fits my previously held beliefs to a T and blam-o! Megan McArdle is actually an evil person!

Man, I'm really starting to get the hang of this punditry stuff. Maybe I'll see if Teh Atlantic needs a liberal blogger to replace Fatty Wrong-on-the-war.

Humorless Section

Alright, Megan McA. has just about completely lost it.

Your afternoon smile 28 Jul 2008 03:57 pm
Here. No, I can't explain. Just click.

Your click will lead you to this:Enough commenters didn't get it that she felt obliged to do an update.

Update Okay, for those who totally didn't get the joke, perhaps this will explain:

"This" is an imbed of the Baha Men's snappy & popular "Who Let The Dogs Out?" video. I'm either too smart, too stupid, or have no grasp of the obvious, because I "like totally" don't get it. It's a map of the United Snakes, w/ each state given a color on the spectrum between common sense, decency & humanity (New York, Vermont & Jersey) to the aggressively retarded guns & gawd group (Idaho & Utah). And?

Business major?!?!?!?

Megan knows that the economy is bad because:

When even Apple, which can't keep the new iPhone 3G on the shelves, is warning that it expects lean times ahead, you know things are pretty awful.

Yeah, I mean, how can Apple be expecting loss when they have a succesful product! < Matt whispers in ear > You mean Apple makes more than one product?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

Now, her failure to understand economics is understandable since she never went to school for it, but she's a fucking MBA!!!!!!! How in the hell does she fail so completely to understand business?

Megan, you really are a moron.

Megan, Is That You?

If it really is McArdle, this is a pretty awful response to the question posed, which was, "Well, do you have any suggestions as to what can be done about torture, etc., then?"

No, nor do I have any suggestion for how to deal with the perennial problem of unrequited love, the dissatisfactions of aging, or parents who say horrible things to their children. Sometimes life's a bugger.
Posted by Megan McArdle June 21, 2008 10:15 AM

Come to think of it, she's had about eight hrs. to delete this & advise all that it wasn't her typing, so unless she's off for the wknd., we can assume that she ranks "unrequited love" w/ torture & mass murder. What do you know? Again the "life's a bugger," or, "life is unfair, so..." Why any fucking laws then? Why not anarchy in the streets, & the farmlands as well?

Interesting comment thread in general. Megan has a bit of a hissy fit on FMM friend Susan of Texas, & there's the usual "leftie Euroweenie" blather from the guns, gawd, & homophobia folk.

Leap of Something

From "No, don't let first cousins marry!" to "Whittle your mating population down to a thousand people and you're asking for trouble," in seven easy lines. Is that a leap of faith or logic?

I've often found that whittling my mating population down resulted in many fewer potential mates, even among those not actually whittled down.

Fabulous, My Ass!

Ms. Megan says:

Art imitates life

The ever-fabulous Dr. Boli offers a fable about Myanmar.

So I finally gave in & clicked it. Trust me, it wasn't worth it. None of her commenters thought it was either. It's not art & it didn't imitate life. Is "Boli" the plural of bolus?

P. S.: Get it? It's not, like, ironic, it's a fable, so she called him "ever-fabulous."

P. P. S.: If one of you co-bastards had posted something today, I wouldn't have felt obligated to suffer like this.

wtf?

Can anyone parody this?

What adult would not only think this: "I realized the other night that I still haven't really emotionally grasped the fact that I am never going to have superpowers.", But actually share it with other people?

Weird.

Things I learned in Community College: How to be Megan McArdle

Our oh so balanced econo-Englishcist decides it's been too long since she wrote a book report and, after the usual long winded and pointless anecdotal preamble, decides to go ahead and give us her thoughts on her current read. (Question about those preambles; why do you have to tell people WHY you're making a post? If it's not apparent from the content of the post, the post prolly wasn't worth writing. Then again, none of your posts are worth writing so... nevermind. Carry on.)

So how does she start this return to her undergrad days? Why, with shit ass freshmen level writing that looks like a perfunctory attempt at summarizing a book that was merely skimmed so that adequate time for preening and getting drunk was still had, of course. Megan strive for authenticity, if nothing else. I must say, this is the one area in which she succeeds. Everything she produces is authentically and unabashedly, Megan McArdle.

The first thing that strikes you is her hero-worship of her father. Modern people don't write like this; we want to see parents as people. In Addams' portrayal, her father comes across as a sort of Christ-like figure--endlessly patient, kind, generous, modest, and so forth. The childhood she describes in a small Illinois town is so perfectly idyllic that you can't help but wonder what dark secret she was hiding

Now, let's play "you're a TA teaching freshmen comp"

The first thing that strikes you (uneccessary) is her hero-worship of her father. Modern people (who?!) don't write like this; w. We want to see parents as people (we do? citation! provide examples!). In Addams' portrayal, her father comes across as a sort of(if he's sort of christ-like, why not skip that and tell us what he actually is?) Christ-like figure --(. He is)endlessly patient, kind, generous, modest, and so forth. The childhood she describes in a small Illinois town is so perfectly idyllic (idllyic means perfect! don't use words you don't know!) that you can't help but wonder what dark secret she was hiding( awkward. also provide examples from the text!).

Megan,

Please see me after class.

Sincerely,
your professor, who writes crap like this for his second semester community college English class, but knows better than to be proud of it (or even think that anywhere else it'd get anything other than a gigantic freaking F and the continuous scorn of anyone who ever gazed upon it)