I was really good and didn’t read McMegan for a while, but for some reason or another, I started up again. Today, Megan reacts to the following video:
Basically, teabaggers and health care advocates were on two sides of a street each doing their thing about health care reform, and a man with Parkinson’s sat down in front of the teabagging fools. They proceeded to berate him and throw money at him and basically act like scumbags. Megan’s response:
No matter how frail his condition, could the fellow on the ground possibly have been seriously endangered by having two bills hurled his way?
I’d certainly be willing to take such harsh treatment from the nice folks at Progress Ohio.
Great. Get back to us when you have Parkinson’s disease, asshole, and I can find a few people to throw shit at you.
Are we going to have to end up paying these glibertarians to go Galt?
schrodinger's cat
I am speechless, I have nothing to say.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Megan is the bright bulb that used data about people taking their animals to the vet to prove that people without health care insurance don’t drive up health care costs. Don’t ask me how, I studied it and broke my brain. No mo MCcardle fo me.
batgirl
I don’t usually approve of name-calling, but given that McMegan is acting like a child, please name call away.
whinger
Those people are walking distance from my house. I’m so proud to be an Ohioan.
Kryptik
Fuck McMegan.
No other words are necessary, and I wouldn’t want to waste any more that weren’t some sort of ugly profanity, since she doesn’t deserve any better after that comment.
williamc
She just wants a bail-out before she goes Gault.
I’m sure in Jane Gault’s gulch, no one ever says anything mean, everyone has an MBA and the emotional response of a drug-addled 20yo.
EvolutionaryDesign
OT, but the new BJ subheader at the top of the page is teh awesome
Tom Hilton
Apparently she thinks the Progress Ohio press release was deceptive because these douchebags weren’t throwing, I don’t know, bricks or bottles or chairs or god knows what.
See, they were just mocking the guy. That isn’t so bad, is it?
West of the Cascades
“Compassionate conservatism” evidently now involves tossing two dollars at sick people. This also will probably rapidly be adopted by the GOP as their alternative health care reform plan.
Is there any way to reference links without including clickable links? I’m now treating McCardle as I treat Jane Hamsher – willing to read endlessly what others say about what useless prats they are, but unwilling to give them any site traffic by actually reading their drivel any more. There seems to be good boycott potential here.
Corner Stone
@schrodinger’s cat: You lie!
freelancer
What a complete F-star-star-Cunt.
“I’ve heard progressives yell far worse things at pro-lifers protesting abortion clinics.” [BTW, an anecdote that is in all likelihood, bullshit.]
Well, it’s all okay as long as it’s an equivocation-filled race to the bottom, right?
John Cole
@EvolutionaryDesign: I finally figured out how to edit it.
Comrade Mary
PICS OR IT DIDN’T HAPPEN, COLE!
Napoleon
@EvolutionaryDesign:
Agreed – earlier today it was something different from yesterday. Cole must be rotating subheaders.
Adam Collyer
What in the world is wrong with people?
I have to tell you that I’m truly sick of living in a world where I have to apologize for being a polite, decent human being and caring about other people. Where we mythologize cynical, destructive, and cruel behavior because it’s “funny” or looks “cool.”
Maybe I’m just a “square,” but I hate cynicism. I hate negativity. And I hate when other people get treated this way. If this is what America sees as justifiable behavior and competent debating, I just can’t figure out what to do.
Jules
I can not believe that anyone could watch that and not find the behavior of the teaparty folks as anything but disgusting.
I guess Megan and her readers lack the compassion gene?
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@Comrade Mary:
LOL, I just noticed it. Spicy it is.
bemused
She’d be willing to take such harsh treatment, right. She’d have her panties in a twist in a nanosecond & so would the rest of the wingnut world.
Nasty people there.
Doubt we’ll see this clip on Faux.
Kryptik
@freelancer:
Not to mention that I’ve yet to hear a pro-reform protester stalk insurance companies’ families, out their addresses, show up with pictures of dead clients, or shoot their CEOs.
Fuck McMegan and her false equivalence. And yes, ‘Fuck McMegan’ will become my new sign-off on any post regarding her. It’s all she’s deserving off. So…
Fuck McMegan.
Violet
Wow. I knew she was terrible, but this is a new low. How can anyone watch this and not have sympathy for this man. Of course he’s not going to be hurt by the money being thrown at him. That’s not the point. The simple lack of respect for him as a human being is what’s shocking.
Megan is a monster that she can’t see what’s wrong with this whole situation.
Mnemosyne
So if McMegan’s boyfriend got up after having sex with her and tossed a couple of dollar bills on the nightstand for her as he got ready to leave, that would be totally cool, right? It’s not like money is ever used to insult someone because money is inherently good.
Corner Stone
Rahm was right about HCR you know. He’s been vindicated. Ben Smith says so at DougJ’s favorite news source. So it must be true.
SpotWeld
I very much a risk hitting Godwin’s Law full force here, but did anyone suddenly think that Megan McArdle’s tone is something like admiring the Nazi’s for having the audacity to make the Jews clean up all that broken glass?
Corner Stone
People. They went after Graeme Frost. they heckled that woman at an HCR rally who had cancer (?). These are the same people in mentality if not in fact.
Nothing’s too low for them.
Paul M
Jesus, just go look at the comments over there. I’ve never seen so much dancing on the head of a pin and so little basic decency and compassion.
“Technically True but Collectively Nonsense,” indeed.
Violet
@Mnemosyne:
It would be even better if he shouted “No more handouts!” at her while he walked away.
Incertus (Brian)
@Corner Stone: No shit. Hell, they’re just following the lead El Rushbo set for them, right?
ruemara
Fuck her & fuck those bits of dessicated husks.
LuciaMia
Always love the ‘what’s the big deal?’ kind of argument. The reality that Tea Party mentality is making it’s members act like viscous morons, obviously doesn’t enter into the equation.
Also too. The ‘no big deal’ line made me think of yesterday’s special election in NY. Ousted senator Monserrate insisted on running against Peralta. In the news coverage, one of his supporters said ‘well, it’s not like he killed anybody.” Nope. He just sliced open his girlfriends face, lied about it and tried to get her to do the same.
danimal
@bemused:
I’ll take that bet.
Beck will show it a thousand times, parsing every movement, thought and action taken by the gentleman with Parkinson’s.
By the time the video is Fox-ified, it will be used as yet another proof of the liberal conspiracy to ram health care down our throats. Maybe Breitbart will help with the editing.
toujoursdan
The whole thing drives me crazy. Who doesn’t get handouts and subsidies in this economy? Attend public school or did your private school teacher? Use a road or public highway? Grow food? Buy food?
Ugh.
Meg
I start to think she is probably a sociopath.
dmsilev
@Mnemosyne:
She’s a glibertarian. She’d probably take it as a compliment.
Assuming her belief system is self-consistent, of course.
-dms
Kryptik
@LuciaMia:
“What’s the big deal if you’re gonna die? You’re not rich, so you deserve it! No one gets sick if they’re really good, so you must be a lazy bum!” It’s like compassion is totally lost on people. and christ, if people can’t understand the sheer contempt that it takes to throw shit into the face of a Parkinson’s sufferer like that, no matter what he’s doing to you.
So Eff McMegan and her bots (ok, so toning it down so I’m not F-bombing every time I post in this thread)
Carrie
What time is it?
Yeah, it’s 7:41 PM, bitches.
schrodinger's cat
I am not really surprised, remember during the summer how McCardle was justifying people brandishing guns outside Obama’s health-care rallies/townhalls. I don’t read her, her arguments make little if any sense to me.
Mark S.
@Mnemosyne:
It’s more honest than what she gets paid for doing at the Atlantic.
SiubhanDuinne
Tweety just showed the clip* to Mike Pence, and forced him to agree that the people mocking and throwing contemptuous coin at the man acted despicably. I was just about to say “Well, good on ya, Pence” when he heaved an equivalency brick at my head — “Many people protesting the Iraq war acted just as despicably” (paraphrasing, of course, but that was the gist).
I have no words for the disgust in which I hold those people, and the McMegans of this world. Horrible.
*Tweety ran the same clip earlier in his program tonight, but it was with a different Congressional guest. Someone named Connelly, maybe? No one I had been aware of, not that that means anything.
maus
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
Well, she is correct in that Republicans want the poor to be “put to sleep” if they can’t afford their treatments.
gnomedad
When I saw this, I thought the response would be along the lines of “the liberals are trying to embarrass us with an isolated incident” but apparently this was totally OK and not embarrassing at all.
Splitting Image
Obviously. If you factor in Medicare, Social Security, and all of the other pies that they have their little fingers in, you’re basically already paying them to do anything else.
gbear
@Kryptik:
I hope you never have to use it again.
@Paul M:
Damn. I was hoping to hear she was getting ripped. Damn.
bemused
@danimal:
If this behavior is no big deal as Megan & some of her commenters seem to think, I don’t see why Faux should be shy about showing the clip. They should be proud of their teaparty viewers, wouldn’t ya think?
AhabTRuler
I think it’s a little late in the development of our culture and history for that.
jg
Rt: from @markos
All the things we did
Are unconstitutional
When you do them now
maus
@SiubhanDuinne:
Ungh, “blah blah blah the liberals hate our troops”.
ed
Yeah, prolly. And those assholes will be all, “Ha! Told ya!”
freelancer
@gnomedad:
Agreed. It can’t be called nutpicking if this disdainful, abhorrent shit is homogeneous across the entire spectrum of their movement.
KRK
Isn’t this is the person who “wrote” that she had a personal understanding of what it was like to be in a refugee camp after her experience of waiting in line for several hours to buy an iphone? Now that’s suffering.
FlipYrWhig
Didn’t Megan McCardle compare waiting in line for the new iPhone to being a refugee, and not by implication, by direct comparison? She has a fundamental problem with the notion of sympathetic identification.
ETA: Doh, KRK remembered the same thing at the same time. I shouldn’t’ve been distracted by “work.”
Shinobi
I hope that some day when those jackasses are watching someone they love suffer they remember the day that they threw money at a man who was suffering and needed our help. Perhaps someone should follow them around for eternity with this video on a loop.
@jg: He has some of the best tweets.
patrick II
Grayson’s new description of the Republican health care plan:
1. Don’t get sick
2. And if you do get sick…
3. Prepare yourself for attempted humiliation before you…
4. Die quickly
JenJen
@SiubhanDuinne: Glad you noted Pence’s false equivalence game; I was yelling at the teevee when he was on. He’s far worse than McMegan.
ETA: Watching POTUS on Fox News now (via MSNBC), and if I didn’t know better, I’d think that interviewer was a teabagger. Loved when the interviewer said (paraphrasing), “We’ve received 18,000 letters from Fox News viewers, and they say you suck”, and Obama answerd, “I receive 40,000 letters a day saying, “Why haven’t you fixed health care yet?” Good stuff.
FMguru
Remember, these are the people that Jane Whatsername believes we need to form bonds with in order to unelect Bernie Saunders and Al Frankin in order to enact progressive policy, and if you disagree with that strategy you’re a corporate tool.
Meg
@shinobi
It will not have any effect on her if she is a sociopath.
wasabi gasp
Decisions about your health care should be between you and
your doctorsomebody tossing coins in your cup.DA
Absolutely disgusting. Megan has sunk low before, but this may be the vilest thing I’ve ever seen her write. If she had even the slightest amount of human decency she would be ashamed of herself.
Kryptik
@gbear:
Well, I’d rather be forced to use it than have her bile go unexposed.
@DA:
What is this “shame” you speak of? I thought as long as a hippie gets punched, there wasn’t any such thing as “shame”?
Oh, and Eff McMegan.
SiubhanDuinne
@Jenjen
Well, let’s not get carried away here :-)
Seriously? I agree, he prolly is, just because he’s so smooth with it. McM is a blunt instrument. Pence is a silken cord. Both lethal, but one is aesthetically preferable, thus much more lethal.
Slightly O/T: just watching clips of Obama’s Fox interview. I never heard of the dude “conducting” the “interview” (superfluous quotation marks deliberate) but dear me, he does love to interrupt the President of the United States.
/Obot
Annie
The ultimate irony is that these same people would rally against Christianity being taken out of public schools, and many of them probably receive some support from the government. They would be the first to seek government support if they lost their jobs and would be the first to complain if their parents and elderly relatives lost Medicare.
They have yet to storm the offices of Republican officials who receive huge entitlements, such as farm subsidies, and who live extremely well from government-sponsored health care.
But they can exhibit their masculinity and patriotism by throwing a couple of dollars at a man suffering from an awful disease. Makes me feel proud to be an American.
kth
Just amazing that none of the people taunting Parkinson’s guy (benefit of the doubt: he could easily have been a provocateur, not really had Parkinson’s, just was pretending to have it in service of a higher truth; still) thought, whoa, on the off chance he really has Parkinson’s, maybe we shouldn’t taunt him but should forthrightly explain our position, show sympathy for his illness, etc.
But no, it’s like they have a group hard-on or smell blood. You never see one of them try to restrain the others, even slightly. It’s never, “well I feel sorry for Michael J. Fox, but I can’t sacrifice unborn people just for him”. It’s “fuck Michael J. Fox, he’s exaggerating the shakes to get people to feel sorry for him.”
Shinobi
@Meg: I think it is unlikely that these people are really sociopaths. I think it is more likely that they are currently part of a mob of self interested bastards.
The mob supports them in their delusions. It allows them to believe that only people who don’t work need health care, it allows them to mock someone who is ill because there are 30 other people standing around them mocking the same ill person.
I bet that if it was someone they knew, someone they cared about, someone they didn’t connect with “the enemy” on health care reform, they would care. If it was their child, or their father they would want the best care, and if they couldn’t afford it they would expect someone to help them afford it.
I think it is really important that we understand the psyche of people who disagree with us, and dismissing them as sociopaths is just overly simplistic. (I doubt a true sociopath would actually care enough to write a blog or show up at a protest.)
These are people with mistaken beliefs about why people end up in bad circumstances and mistaken ideas about how our society can be fixed. Their value system isn’t even necessarily the issue here because they are basing their opinions on false assumptions and poor logic. They have a mob of people and media standing beside them. But if they had to stand alone they would fall.
(I realize you were probably just joking… but the psychology of why people think things that make no sense is really interesting to me… and I have problems with shutting up.)
Kryptik
@Annie:
Nothing manlier than kicking a man while he’s down. Nope, nosiree.
@Shinobi:
Oh god, I forgot about that whole shit too. Apparently, Parkinson’s isn’t worth empathy…oh wait, I forgot, empathy means you’re a bad person or something to Republicans and Gliberatarians.
SiubhanDuinne
@Jenjen
Well, let’s not get carried away here :-)
Seriously? I agree, he prolly is, just because he’s so smooth with it. McM is a blunt instrument. Pence is a silken cord. Both deadly, but one is aesthetically preferable, thus much more lethal.
Slightly O/T: just watching clips of Obama’s Fox interview on Countdown. I never heard of the dude “conducting” the “interview” (superfluous quotation marks deliberate) but dear me, he does love to interrupt the President of the United States. POTUS is doing a fantastic job holding his own and then some, giving as good as he gets, etc.
/Obot
curious
5% of people are sociopaths. most know enough to hide it but it seems tea party protests and parkinson’s victims are opportunities too rich to pass by.
WereBear
@kth: Health care is such a stark issue, and yet they cling to their propaganda.
When presented by a sick man, they can admit they are wrong… or torment the man for making them face what they are.
I don’t think the Iraq war protesters were ever faced with that choice. And I never saw them act like that.
Annie
@Kryptik:
LOL, or Cry out Loud…I think I will do both…
Just Some Fuckhead
Wow, you have time to read the Atlantic AND write oh-so-clever-three-weeks-ago sarcastic and resentful Balloon Juice slogans? I gotta say, I didn’t think there’d be a place on The Left for your Republican tendencies of sucking up to power combined with an irrational and lingering resentment of anyone that failed to goose step along side ya. But you have found your place, sir!
SRW1
Megan’s reward system runs on glib, that’s why she can’t feel empathy for people who suffer from a deficiency of dopamine.
curious
@Annie: at first i just wanted to dismiss this as disgusting but the macho showiness makes it sad really. no doubt the two ringleaders will go home, chests puffed out in victory, and regale their fellow assholes with tales of their glory.
ksmiami
They are evil sick fuckers which is why I turned my whole back on the right in 1990 and never went back
Mnemosyne
@Just Some Fuckhead:
I think JSF has a new virtual girlfriend. Leave McMegan alooooone!
r€nato
Remember, Michael J. Fox was faking his Parkinson’s too.
In fact, I believe that all people who can’t afford / have been bankrupted by health care, have a secret pro-sociaIist agenda. That makes them ‘fair game’.
Mark S.
@kth:
Even when I was a wingnut, I can’t imagine I would ever heckle and scream at a disabled person. I still had a conscience, something most of these guys seem to have jettisoned.
r€nato
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Oh, so now John Cole is on your enemies’ list?
I knew you had it in you, to turn on your fellow commenters. I tried to think the best of you but I’m not at all surprised.
BDeevDad
I can’t view the video. But since I have PD, I am sort of glad I cannot.
John Cole
@Just Some Fuckhead: What happened to you? You used to be really funny.
Annie
@curious:
I know. After they puff up their chests, they will check that their parents got the medical care they need, that their brother got his unemployment check, and that their aunts and uncles got their security checks, so they don’t have to give them extra money because they had no savings.
Then they will go to Church to show how virtuous they are, and after that they will go to a school board meeting that throws evolution out of the curriculum, right before they go to a doctor’s appointment to a great doctor, who is only great because he got a good science education that enabled him to go to medical school, and actually know something…
PeakVT
[McAddled] has sunk low before, but this may be the vilest thing I’ve ever seen her write.
I think the 2×4 post is still her worst. But this one comes close.
FlipYrWhig
@John Cole: Is JSF like Saturday Night Live, where everyone has always said that it _used_ to be funny but has never actually seen it being funny in real time?
Ash Can
@John Cole: How ’bout it.
You, on the other hand, are thankfully still a
grouchriot. I’m absolutely loving the new sub-headings.celticdragonchick
@Shinobi:
I agree. Nice analysis.
Mr Furious
As some of you know, I work in publishing… Last week the ASME (American Society of Magazine Editors) announced the finalists for the 2010 Awards—which is like the Oscars for magazines…
I just about spit my coffee out when I read this:
Really, Bennet? Over the last year, the three best columns in The Atlantic were McArdle’s?
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@John Cole:
Fuckhead has soured on the black dude, and wants desperately for you to join him. The only question is why.
Anne Laurie
@Tom Hilton:
So she’s learned from the notorious incident, back in her ‘I Am Jane Galt’ blogging days, when she wrote that protestors at the 2004 RNC convention “should be beaten with two-by-fours” because they inconvencied McArdle’s cappucino search. When decent people quite rightly protested at that time, she fell back on the “I didn’t actually know what 2x4s were, and besides — satire!” defense. Attaining her current professional status has at least raised her (or her editor ha ha ha ha) to a level of self-awareness where she defends the relative harmlessness of Her Team’s weapons rather than cheerleading for violence as a first-effort solution. Yay, Jane Galt! Money does make Objectivists smarter!
MP
When I read stuff like this, I keep thinking I should have a copy of the DSM for a reference. Clearly, my definition of sociopathic can’t be correct.
jnfr
Somehow that video’s been taken private, and I can’t view it any more. Seems kind of pointless, since Tweety was all over it tonight, but too bad since I had a few places I wanted to show it around.
Mike Schilling
@renato
Yeah, what is it about Parkinson’s that makes the Right lose all sense of decency?
jcricket
I subjected myself to the comment section (I don’t know why). My favorite part is all the “reasonable” Libertarians who spend time arguing the guy does indeed want a “hand-out” and to “take money from some and give it to others”.
While I may grant there is an element of truth to this, you’ll note this logic never extends to criticizing all the handouts corporations and rich people get.
The selective logic of Libertarians, and hand-waving away of any contradictions, at every, single, fucking turn is just ridiculous. Libertarianism is a simplistic ideology, for simple-minded folks, who can’t think through all the complexity in the real world. Yet we treat them as some kind of “serious thinkers”.
I long ago stopped debating or engaging with Libertarians. They’re a joke.
Nicole
I don’t know if it counts as good news, but, here in PA (visiting my uncle and my horse), my uncle’s beloved local conservative blowhard radio host (whose name I can’t remember) got chewed out by several callers when he tried to explain why health care reform was a disaster. The ones I heard had very specific, angry stories about how they’re suffering under the current system. And were rather well-informed on the details of HCR. Will it make a diff? I don’t know, but it was interesting to hear conservatives not buying what the radio guy was selling.
Shinobi
@celticdragonchick: Thanks! :-) I have my very own wingnut that I get to study so I can understand them in their natural habitat.
Godless American
Can’t see the video because it says it’s private and I’m not a friend of the youtube person…
Can we be friends?
I want to see that video and spread it around!!!!!
Zuzu's Petals
Why no. And that’s all that matters, after all.
Zuzu's Petals
@Tom Hilton:
Yeah, I’m trying to see exactly where they said anything at all about the guy being “endangered.”
Of course that would mean McMegan is making a strawman argument. Heaven forfend.
Ed Drone
@Mnemosyne:
Of course not! She’d have to get up and find 75 cents change!
Ed
Zuzu's Petals
@jcricket:
It’s hard to see where not being denied coverage because of your condition is a handout, but maybe I’m missing something.
rikyrah
fuck this bitch. Had it with her. she’s repulsive.
asiangrrlMN
I haven’t watched the video. Shit like this sickens me. MM2’s tepid and twisted defense is repulsive. I don’t read her, and every time I read a snippet of what she’s written (or, if I’m feeling extra-masochistic, a whole column), I am reminded of why.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@asiangrrlMN: Good decision to not watch. It put me in a grade A cranky mood.
CADoc
This whole past year spent on healthcare reform has revealed a really amazing lack of empathy, compassion and imagination in a good size portion of the American population. It seems so obvious to me that all of us who don’t have large trust funds are one bad illness away from being broke and without healthcare coverage. Hard to imagine how the same country that supported each other through the Great Depression and WWII could behave like this. What happened to our collective emotional intelligence?
Mister Papercut
I don’t indulge in this often, but I hope someone out there drops a dime on that be-khaki’d dollar-throwing fuck and his life is made appropriately miserable.
Well, more miserable than it apparently must be that he feels compelled to taunt a stricken man…
Batocchio
Of course McMegan finds a way to scold liberals, and also scolds those nasty pro-choice people who say things to those lovely pro-life zealots lovingly harassing women entering abortion clinics. She doesn’t have many sane commenters left, but the few there dismantle her quickly. At one point, she complains that she didn’t see an assault, just people being mean. Um, nice straw man – the meanness was the entire point of highlighting the incident, as it was in highlighting the viciousness of the Graeme Frost crusade. Movement conservatives are mostly callous, nasty assholes. But then, so is McMegan, just with a better pedigree, and she’ll never call out her own kind.
BruinKid
There’s a word for people like that: sociopaths. That’s what Ayn Rand was, a sociopath. It’s that simple.
BDeevDad
@Mister Papercut: Unfortunately, the teabaggers will go after the victim and say he was a plant despite the obvious symptoms he displayed in the few seconds of video. It’s already happening on twitter.
slightly_peeved
Well, Ayn Rand was against men paying for sex, judging from her novels.
She preferred that they just raped women.
brantl
It really was a shame that the guy didn’t spit on the money, and hand it back. That would have been priceless.
twiffer
i had an epiphany the other day (one that i’m sure many others already had). these people are still stuck in the medieval mindset that sickness is a punishment. if you get sick, you must have done something wrong, something sinful. therefore, why show sympathy or try to help (i mean, besides the fact that doing either or both would be true to the spirit of christianity)? this sick, suffering people deserve it, because otherwise they’d be healthy, right?
it all makes disturbing, horrible sense now.
Dog is My Copilot
Absolutely despicable behavior that quite literally makes me ill. I cannot watch someone being treated like that. Is this what the discourse in our society has come to? Berate and belittle someone else because that person stands on the other side of an issue? Just sickening.
gwangung
@BruinKid:
Yah. Her perfect man was a serial killer.
jcricket
@Zuzu’s Petals:
Hey – believe me, I’m on your side. I think the only people describing it as a “handout” are those that don’t think the situation through. But I’m saying, even granting the “logic” behind the phrase or the issue of “wealth redistribution” the critiques made by conservatives and Libertarians ALWAYS only apply to the poor and middle class. With a few rare exceptions, I never hear about the massive handouts to corporations – not just government subsidies, but limited liability, legal award/cap reforms, lack of regulation, tax breaks to “create job”, etc. – These are all straight-up handouts, but somehow Libertarians are all fine with them.
But yeah, calling it a hand-out is clearly a pejorative designed to say that people who can’t afford insurance, even under our current systems ridiculous rules, are undeserving.
Anyhoo – I’ve long since given up on arguing with Libertarians. It’s like arguing with my Communist friends in the early 80s. Or proponents of intelligent design. It’s all built on a house of cards, so there’s no use discussing the top floor details.
Citizen Alan
Is there something I can do to just block posts which have certain tags? Because every time somebody links to the McArdle creature, I can’t resist the urge to go over there and get drawn into a flame war with the she-beast, and it’s really been hard on my blood pressure. I never go to the Atlantic anymore except for when John or somebody here links to some new McArdle atrocity.
silentbeep
McArdle’s site is down, but I found an interesting explanation as to why her lack of compassion is so brazen
Over at Will Wilkinson’s place (a libertarian at Cato) he wrote a post about a study done on the moral psychology of liberals, conservatives and libertarians. Deep within the comments the author of the study chimed in with more details (quotes provided so no one has to click over to Will’s if they don’t want to):
“Libertarian Moral Psychology
by Will Wilkinson on March 11, 2010
Somehow I’ve failed to blog a result about libertarians in one of Jonathan Haidt’s recent papers (with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, 2009 — you can request a copy here) on the relationship between political ideology and his five foundations theory of moral sensibility and judgment. (You can read up on that here.)
(below quote from J.Haidt)
Will:
Great post, great use of our findings. We actually had a lot more information on libertarians in the original draft, but the editor asked us to cut it, thought it wasn’t important enough, wanted us to focus on liberal conservative differences. So now we’re writing a paper comparing libertarians to liberals and conservatives on dozens of scales, and finding so many interesting things. Here’s a preview: Libertarians are liberals who lack bleeding hearts. Libertarians look much more like liberals than like conservatives on most measures, EXCEPT those that have anything to do with compassion, on which libertarians are lower than liberals AND conservatives. The lower levels of compassion, and higher levels of need for cognition and tendency to “systemize” rather than empathize, are probably related to the love of markets.”
So there you have it: there is definitive proof that Megan has a measurable lack of compassion and empathy even compared to conservatives.
B.Co
Check out the dude on the left with the Baby Bjorn. I think I feel worse for that baby than for the gent with Parkinson’s.