Megan weighs in on Graeme Frost

And misses the forest for the trees.
Apparently Megan didn't talk to Matt and Ezra today, because even they managed to get this (easy) one right. First, the facts of the matter. Megan, as we'll see, is aware, for once, of the reality of the case, and thus had a chance to behave like a human. Instead, she's being her own shithead self.

I'm on deadline, so I haven't been following the ephemera of S-Chip as closely as I might. Apparently the Democrats paraded some kid name Graeme Frost in front of a camera in support of S-Chip. Now conservatives are claiming that the kid is actually affluent, and therefore shouldn't be getting gummint money for health insurance. My thoughts:

On something you "haven't been following", mostly based on conservatives' claims. As always, your thoughts amount to telling us what flavors you've found by shoving your head up your ass, Megan.

1) I told y'all this was going to happen. Maybe next time you'll listen, hmmm?

... Fuck you.

2) Anecdotes, no matter how photogenic, are terrible ways to make policy. It doesn't matter how crappy your public policy is; I guarantee I can find one very telegenic person who is better of under your godawful boondoggle of a system than under almost any other potential system. But argument by anecdote is what we seem to be stuck with, particularly in the realm of social policy affecting children. Isn't democracy marvelous?

Yeah, cause the tale of a kid whose life was, if not saved, made livable thanks to help from the government has no bearing on whether we should support such programs. Putting human faces on issues just makes it seem like folk like Megan are evil for treating health insurance like so much bean-counting. Megan isn't evil, just selfish, lazy, unintelligent, and racist. Oh, wait.

3) If Think Progress's account of the case is basically accurate--the family owns its own business, has a lowerish-middle class income, but lives in a basically nice neighbourhood--this actually raises important issues about benefits that no one is asking. To wit: should we expect families to sell assets in order to qualify for benefits? On the one hand, Medicaid's ludicrous rules keep disabled people in crippling poverty. On the other hand many people, including me, don't want to pay for the health care of someone so that they can stay in their Park Avenue mansion. At some point, it is reasonable to expect people to liquidate assets in order to pay for expenses, rather than expecting society to pick up the tab. But I'm not sure what point is reasonable.

Hmmmm, if only there were rules and regulations about such programs designed to determine whether a family qualifies. Instead, free money. Hell, I got $50k from the state of Maryland to help my kid the other day, and I neither live in Maryland nor have a kid. Thanks, taxpayers! But wait,

I don't think this is particularly interesting as it applies to S-Chip; frankly, I doubt there are enough low-income families with children and sizeable assets to make it even worth debating the issue.

She's "on deadline", and it took her 276 words to reach this point. Oy. After several random tangents, we get the first hint that Megan might be human I think I've ever seen.

Moreover, in the case of children, I'm perfectly content to bias the system towards including too many undeserving children, rather than take the chance of missing too many deserving ones.

Credit where it's due, even though she calls this a problem, she's not going to try to do anything about it. Who says she has no sense of charity.
But wait, for those of you who've followed me this far, we finally come to the point, or rather the missing of it.

5) Reading the comments on this, I have to ask conservatives and libertarians: is this really the hill you think we should die on? I do understand your objections to the program, but an informal survey of swing voters, in their current incarnation as my mother, indicates that this is killing you with the moderates. Save it for national health care next year, is what I'm saying. This debate is framing the issue in a way that is going to make things harder, not easier, when Hilarycare is on the table again.

Notice "libertarians and conservatives" goes from "we" to "you" rather quickly. A small but telling moment. More importantly, instead of telling conservatives to shut the fuck up and stop lying about a crippled kid, and stalking his family, just because he's an active supporter of a program that helped him immensely and is underfunded nationwide, Megan is asking whether it's tactically smart. Conspicuously absent from this post is any sense of outrage or horror. All she cares about is whether this will help Hillary take her money to help sick people. Going after crippled kids, therefore, is ok in Megan's book. I wish I could pretend I'm being uncharitable to her, but the implication is clear. It's ok, just be tactically smart about it.
Megan, on behalf of humanity, thank you for not reproducing. Both because you'd effectively abuse any child you had, and because the rest of us would have to deal with someone raised by you.

George Saunders on the Colbert Report

makes up for about 75% of the crap I went through today. Two of my favorite people in the world, together. Dvr a rerun tomorrow, if you missed it.
And, because it can never be ruined by repetition, go read Manifesto, A press release from PRKA, again, or for the first time, and feel a bit more human.
I know this is off-topic as hell, but I can't always be a jackass.

Megan's Online Personality Test, Part I

"Are the best journalists kind of, well, sociopaths?" (October 5th, 2007)

Megan, I'm pretty sure that Sy Hersh didn't spend his formative years wetting the bed, torturing cats and setting fires. That was Michael Gordon's thing.

I find it hard to say even the obvious things about people I've interviewed who are clearly odious media whores, self-destructive louts, or merely deeply silly.

Whereas saying odious, destructive and silly things about black folk comes naturally as breathing. Wasn't "Merely, Deeply, Silly" that movie with Alan Rickman as a dead bloke?

And the closer you get to people, the harder it gets . . .

...when they die in tragic accidents at the shooting range. No, uh, Megan, just how often do you get close to the people you've interviewed?

...which is why most journalists lean farther left the closer they get to on the ground reporting.

Whoops, must have inadvertently switched off my inertial damper, because my brain just flattened against the inside of my skull. Okay, let's walk this one through:

1: Journalists must remain objective and emotionally neutral when confronted with disagreeable human subjects.
2: Objectivity becomes diffficult to maintain when journalists become emotionally involved with their subjects.
3: Hippies.

This does not make them right, mind you; there is a tendency to ignore any costs to their policy prescriptions that are not personified right in front of them, which often means advocating policies that would make society in aggregate worse off. But it's certainly understandable.

Folks, raise your hands if you believe that it is a journalist's professional responsibility to offer policy prescriptions. Dammit, okay, anyone besides Michael Gordon?

I'd say another emerging problem in journalism is that journalists and the people they cover are becoming more and more concentrated in a few cities. And that means that they're all each other's friends. Which means that it's harder to say mean things about each other.

Megan, you're right, it's an intractable problem, and sociopathy the only reasonable response. You're probably despairing, "If only there were an online test capable of screening for useful personality disorders." Good news! There is such a test, and I'm taking it for you:

You can't keep a good man down

and I'm hard to shut up, too.
Race and medical insurance. Prime Meganity today. Short of a post titled "Deny the Jena 6 Healthcare in the Prison They Should Be Sent To", what we have here is the clearest cause for termination of Megan's employment imaginable. I tried to stay away, but I'd be failing the cause not to document what she said today. I'd try and mock the health insurance post, but how many times can I point out that Megan usually writes like a college sophomore who's absorbed the jargon of a class but none of the meaning behind those words? Besides, let's not mistake the trees for the forest.
More importantly, we have a post about race and IQ. Ladies and gentlemen, prepare your *facepalm*s.

With all this talk about IQ, I was tempted to take one of those web IQ tests. And of course, what comes to the fore is the very, very obvious way in which racism could affect IQ: by affecting hard [sic] you try when you get to a difficult problem.

This is a clear rejoinder to those Bell Curve touting racialists that seem to make up a notable percentage of her readers. Blacks are not genetically inferior, they're just lazy.
.....
Mark it down, folks. October 8th, 2007, 10:03 AM. The magazine founded in no small part to give abolitionists a voice, in which Martin Luther King Jr. published "A Letter From a Birmingham Jail", now allows its employees to call blacks lazy. I could go on and mock her laughable attempt to "justify" this claim, but... fuck. That's plain old racist. Not biased, racist. Unintentionally racist, I guess, maybe, but that's no defense. I.... can't go on. Megan, you are actually a worse person than I thought. You're two steps from promoting Prussian Blue. Tom Metzger is about to name you Aryan of the year.
You should be ashamed of yourself, you racist bitch.

I've tried hard to avoid that word, but sometimes the only word that fits is offensive. Women are not bitches, but Megan is (one).

Update:
I missed the [sic] in the quote the first time around, but pointing it out now gives me the chance to poke irony's corpse with a stick.
I am lazy, but I am unpaid.

Update the second:
Oh my. Not to knock Mike's post itself, which I obviously can't help but appreciate, but the Megan, it speaks, and it is not bright.

I can't do this today

I know Megan has given great material to work with, but I woke to a call from my bank wondering if I had indeed withdrawn over $1000 overnight in Australia. As you might guess, I didn't, but because of the holiday I can't even begin to get my money back until tomorrow.
Thus, I am not in the mood for lighthearted snark. Sorry.

New Poll and Random Notes

As always, vote for as many as you'd like.

Smiling Mortician shares good news in the comments to the previous thread.

I just got off the phone with a sales rep from the Atlantic who wanted me to subscribe (I had a subscription a couple years ago). When I said I couldn't support a magazine that actually paid McArdle for her idiocy, she said she'd been hearing that a lot lately, wished me a good day, and signed off.

And finally, Tom Metzger has been commenting here from prison Funtime Aryan Happyland.* Hi Nazi asshole! I like having sex with jews and blacks and the whole rainbow of human colors, because I'm white and want my race to stop existing. And in many ways I'm not kidding! Stop by again, shithead.
Also, Prussian Blue really, really suck.

*- He's not currently in prison. My bad.

Fine, I'll be half serious for a moment

It seems like sometimes when the patriarchy is invoked those charged are guilty until proven innocent, so let me just say a few words about where I'm coming from. Both my parents were raised by single moms. My mother's father was a... cad, who left his wife and two daughters in the 50s to travel the world as an engineer with a genuine victim of the patriarchy, a rich heiress whose father was abusive in ways you just don't want to know about. My father's father died when he was 12, but because that side of the family is well off they were spared the hardships my mother's family experienced. This also meant my father came of age in a home with three women, of whom my grandmother had a stronger will than almost any man I've ever known. My father was, is, he's living but my grandmother is dead, a mama's boy, never living more than a couple miles from her, a few years in NYC excepted. My grandmother's authority was rarely challenged by him, that instead becoming my mother's "job". (Not that they didn't get along well otherwise.) Further, my mom was Vassar class of 69, the final all female class, an active member of what's now usually referred to as second wave feminism, and worked hard to try and get the ERA passed. She stepped back a little from the career world when I was born, leaving her job working for the state to come to the family business where her hours would be flexible, but also to find the time to give more to the then little known choral group she was a part of that would eventually grow into the well known Glimmerglass Opera Co in Cooperstown, NY.
But I digress. My point in providing this background is to say I was raised in an environment where the equality of women was never, even for a moment, in question. My father still throws the occasional temper tantrum to get his way, but I'm actually quite grateful to my parents for giving me such a balanced model for my relationships. They are equal partners, and I never once questioned it. For what it's worth, I also went to Vassar, and thus have spent most of my life surrounded by intelligent, strong women, and I am very glad for it.
So, let me just say this once without snark, just for the record. I don't care about Megan's gender. It is immaterial to me, and not in the "i'm fooling myself" way Megan condescendingly tried to say in her follow-up post. I was raised, and taught, in Vassar, to root out and deal with my biases, especially in regards to women. I won't, can't, claim to be perfect, and, perhaps, Megan's vagina somehow inflects how I go after her here. I doubt it, but I might be missing something. But it has nothing to do with me finding her unqualified and unsuited for the position she now holds. I won't belabor the point, as we all know what protesting too much accomplishes. All I can say is Megan is hardly unique in misusing a very real problem as a shield against self-awareness. Not that she will, but Megan should apologize to those women who genuinely suffer, and unfortunately will continue to.

Update:
To be comprehensive in giving you info about me you don't need to know, my maternal grandmother died of breast cancer before I was born, in no small part because she was a Christian Scientist and refused treatment until too late. My maternal aunt also died of breast cancer, when I was 2.

Furthermore

Having dismissed all her critics as the patriarchy, Megan is now free to opine further on race. Of course, you might be thinking that someone who's shown questionable judgment regarding racially charged issues in the past might not be in a position to provide a balanced look at a difficult topic. And, you'd be right.

In the comments to the previous thread, Freddie said something that got me thinking. Part of the problem with talking about race and gender in America is the definition of racism and sexism. Most of us use a working definition of racism and sexism that is something like "Holding (bad) false beliefs about racial minorities and women". But if that is our definition, everyone is going to fail a racism/sexism self-check: no one believes that their own beliefs are false. I'm sure that Tom Metzger's disciples mostly believe that their views about blacks are absolutely true, and therefore not racist.

You see, Megan knows she has "(bad) false beliefs about racial minorities", but that doesn't mean she has racial biases. Those of us who don't harbor false beliefs about "racial minorities" are simply fooling ourselves, we're all just as bad as Megan, but since she knows it, and is a noted expert on..... um, anyway, since she knows it she can teach the rest of us.

This is why many feminists prefer to focus on institutional outcomes rather than how you, a successful member of the patriarchy, feel about things. The problem is, institutional outcomes have many possible determinants; even if there were no institutional discrimination at all, pregnancy would make outcomes different, in ways that are harder to make justice claims for remedy than cases of straight bigotry. But the other extreme doesn't work either.

I.... cannot parse this chunk into a coherent thought. Which extreme(s)? When did every member of the patriarchy become successful, and start reading her blog? What about black women?
In any case, remember, we're all racist and sexist at heart, because otherwise Megan would have to admit to having some questionable beliefs, and have to face her own failings. Is it too much to ask for you to find some hate or fear in your heart so that poor Megan won't feel bad for the share she has in her own?

"Obsessional critics"

Let's remind everyone here right off the bat, FMM hates women. A lot. Cause I've never touched one without paying her for the lapdance first.
So, when Megan uses a 24 year old study to demonstrate that, yes, there is still sexism in a world where women only make 80% of what men do, it's quite clear what comes next.

I've wondered about this occasionally reading the posts accusing my more . . . er, vehement critics . . . of sexism in their treatment of me. This always elicits hysterical denials, proclamations that of course they are just objectively responding to my awfulness.

Yes, we are the patriarchy, and we are gonna get that damned woman for speaking in public.

But of course, the people in those studies, those auditions, didn't think that they were being sexist. Oh, perhaps some of them really did think "Women aren't good [violinists/scientists/etc], so I'm not going to even bother to listen--next!" But most of them undoubtedly thought that they were doing their level best to evaluate the performance--it's just that they'd already started out by deciding that the person who's work they were judging, being a woman and all, probably wasn't all that bright. And if challenged on it, they would have undoubtedly indignantly responded that they couldn't be sexist--after all, they're [scientists/musicians/whatever]. Besides, they love women scientists--they talk about Marie Curie all the time. It's just that this woman--okay, and this one over here, and this one too, and maybe that group there--all happen to be producing substandard work.

It's not Megan, it's us. But she's not hiding behind her vagina, not at all.

I don't actually have an opinion on whether sexism helps motivate my more obsessional critics; it's not an area of women's studies in which I'm particularly well versed, and I'm probably the person least qualified to judge whether my gender is helping me, as my critics aver, or hurting me, as my supporters claim. Although I confess, I can't help but wonder when people turn up in my comment section to accuse me of ignorance when their very comments make it obvious that they are markedly less well-versed in the subject than I am, and moreover, seem to have gathered their fierce confidence about my ignorance from some other commenter, always male, who also clearly knows less about the subject at hand than I do. At such times, I do tend to wonder whether they would have taken quite such a belligerently condescending tone with a man.

Yes, Gavin is clearly much nicer to guys. I, of course, have no excuse, but I've already said I hate you lovely not touched by me creatures. The fact I'm just starting a relationship has no bearing on this, but, once I touch her, this site will be deleted.
But not only has Megan discovered the truth about criticism of her, she now understands racism, despite, shall we say, her own questionable biases.

But that's just passing bemusement, the most vivid recent example of a broader thought, which is that self-examination is not always the best way to determine whether you are discriminating. Most of modern discrimination does not consist of calling someone "nigger" on the street; it consists of deciding, in the blink of an eye, that you'd really rather hire someone else. You don't need to think "someone else white"; statistically, that's the result--even when the candidates or their resumes have been carefully selected to be identical. Statistically, you are less likely to get hired as a black man with a clean record than as a white ex-con.

So, yeah, I'm also probably a racist.
I'm going to avoid taking issue with the concept of a patriarchy, cause I don't feel like being lectured by Ilyka Damen. That said, it's pretty fucking low to use gender bias to attempt to dismiss your critics when your flaws are as obvious as Megan's. There isn't a hint of self-awareness here, just a self-serving appropriation of genuine injustice as a means of avoidance of personal failings. Megan knows tons more about everything than us critics do, and if she's substantially wrong about, say, the Jena 6 or rh's new release or the housing market in NYC or....., well, that's just the exception that proves the rule.
I know I'm supposed to be mad that Megan called me sexist, but I'm really just disappointed in her. Hiding behind sexism is just cowardly, and frankly pathetic.

Update:
Since this is a loaded topic, let me be extra clear. I think the various problems collected under the heading of "the patriarchy" are, almost universally, very real issues. There's aspects of the theory I disagree with, but I agree the phenomena the theory tries to explain are real. Hiding behind sexism when it's not present is what Megan is doing, and what I'm calling pathetic.

Friday Race Blogging: Schräge Musik*

If it's Friday, it must be time for McArdle to muse on race in America. It's fitting that today's posts should come after a week of postings on Richard Wagner. From McArdle's "What Is Racism?:"

Part of the problem with talking about race and gender in America is the definition of racism and sexism. Most of us use a working definition of racism and sexism that is something like "Holding (bad) false beliefs about racial minorities and women". But if that is our definition, everyone is going to fail a racism/sexism self-check: no one believes that their own beliefs are false.

Maintaining erroneous beliefs about races or genders not our own is part of the racist/sexist pathology, but to argue that ignorance is racism (or sexism) is just silly, a strawman woven with a single narrow reed. I don't know who the "most of us" McArdle refers to might be, but I can speak for myself, and my definitions of racism and sexism are built around a core enmity towards "the other" and a well-oiled sense of relative superiority. Racists aren't simply ignorant, they actively dislike the other, and believe their own race to be superior. McArdle is smart and sophisticated enough to know these things, which makes their glaring omision from her formula all the more troubling. Perhaps she simply liked her strawman too much. On the other hand, an economics writer who believes that The Atlantic Monthly is a perfectly appropriate place to solicit online dating advice (for a friend!) must have a healthy sense of entitlement; that a sense of superiority can be corrosive might be a foreign concept to her.

And "no one believes that their own beliefs are false?" What of doubt, agnosticism and crises of faith? What of rank hypocrisy? Sometimes I think that McArdle's project takes as its goal the eradication of the potential for human growth. At other times, I think she took the wrong lessons from Derrida and Foucault:

I'm sure that Tom Metzger's disciples mostly believe that their views about blacks are absolutely true, and therefore not racist.

This is why many feminists prefer to focus on institutional outcomes rather than how you, a successful member of the patriarchy, feel about things. The problem is, institutional outcomes have many possible determinants; even if there were no institutional discrimination at all, pregnancy would make outcomes different, in ways that are harder to make justice claims for remedy than cases of straight bigotry. But the other extreme doesn't work either.

Oh well, nothing works. At least, neither discrete approach to combating racism and sexism works. The possibility that both personal appeals and structural reforms might work well together, not as a binary but as complementary ideas, never occurs, or is quickly suppressed for the sake of argument. Or does McArdle scoff at comprehensive redress because it might effect a cure of what ails her? Whenever McArdle writes about race, two things happen. First, McArdle disputes what is knowable and certain but finds a way to get in at least one dig. "I'm not sure what happened in Jena, as the facts are in dispute, but I'm certain those six black kids belong in jail." "I don't know why black patrons are sparse at my Starbucks, but I know they don't frequent the bike trails." "I don't know why The New York Times focused on the dating travails of affluent, professional white women, but I'm sure that minority women go unmarried because their men don't have jobs." Second, her readers speak approvingly of The Bell Curve. They're out in force today.

Which brings me back to Wagner. McArdle put up two posts about the composer this week, one an appreciation of a downloaded Der Ring des Nibelungen (great because she got it from Amazon "ridiculously cheap"), and the other an anecodote about a Berlin organ-grinder who leveraged a street encounter with the composer to advertise himself as Wagner's pupil. In life, Wagner was a thoughtful kind of racist and bigot, capable of maintaining close friendships with Jews while scolding their pernicious cultural influence and calling for their assimilation. In death, Wagner was appropriated by thuggish racists and bigots, to the lasting detriment of his personal (and artistic) reputation. I don't know if Megan McArdle qualifies as a racist or bigot, but she certainly has blind spots big as a barn. It would be unfair to judge McArdle solely by her audience's prejudices, but they're responding to something, and regularly seize upon her convoluted, opaque meanderings as proofs of their own racial and sexual enmities. McArdle could stop feeding them, but hasn't done so. I wonder, why not?

*Literally "slanting music," German slang for Jazz, also the name given to the installation of oblique firing cannon in WWII Luftwaffe night fighters.