Update, Correction, and (gulp) Apology:
As Megan McArdle notes below — very mildly, I’d add, given the provocation — there is a material error in this post, right there in the first line below this correction.
I said “She actually writes…” when, as she says, she did not. The quoted lines below are from the Post itself. McArdle was quoting the Post’s ombudman, Andrew Alexander.
Whatever one may think of the context of McArdle’s celebration of the Post’s errors, what I wrote was wrong, and I apologize to Ms. McArdle for the error.
Did that hurt to write? Yes it did. But it is necessary. Live by the snark, die by it, on occasion.
_____
So Megan McArdle actually goes there. In a post titled “Department of Awful Statistics,” she busts on the Washington Post for its presumed tropism toward arithmetical mistakes. She actually writes
I regularly hear complaints that numbers in Post stories don’t add up.
__
…Many [errors] are inexplicable, such as last Tuesday’s A-section story that said new industry-wide health-care rules, “will affect about 180 Americans with private insurance” (it should have been 180 million).
This, from the woman who infamously mistook $250 for $25, and then proceeded to build an entire argument on why we shouldn’t bother allowing taxes on the rich to return to Clinton-era levels. (Don’t worry — that link leads to the most excellent Susan of Texas’s blog*, in which Ms. McArdle is (metaphorically) gutted like a Grand Banks cod and left to dry on the margin.)
__
Sometimes one fumes at the egregious “work” (sic–ed.) of the Atlantic’s Business and Economics Editor. Sometimes one rages. Here, it’s just a snort and a chortle.
A kinder person would simply avert one’s gaze and pass by in silence.
Me — I gotta laugh…and put put the boot in. Whereof that which is miscounted, those who cannot count must remain silent.
*I should note that Susan got there first with this snark too, but then she always does. And hell — I come by the post honestly, having tracked McArdle down — with wonder — from the link at Ta-Nehisi Coates’ fabulous post on The Sons of Confederate Veterans celebration of slavery and the Times‘ miserable coverage of same.
Image: Nicolas Neufchâtel, ” The Schoolmaster Johann Neudörffer and a Student,” 1561.
Tim
I’m an artist myself, but what’s with these old paintings dorking up the place?
Carnacki
The lack of self awareness by the Megans of the world is astounding at times.
Sharl
@Tim: Yeah, they’re boooring.
He should use something like this! One of yours?
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
This is why I come here. And the pictures are cool, too.
Tom Levenson
@Tim:
There you have your answer, I think. To what question? Now that’s the question.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Megan needs to clear the plus signs out of her eye before she goes pointing out others.
Carnacki
@Tim: I think they give the joint a touch of class like some of those high-brow vampire blogs.
Sentient Puddle
Timed this thread perfectly, Tom. If there’s anything everyone on the blog can come together on, it’s mocking Megan McArdle.
Anne Laurie
@Tim: I think the pictures class up this joint, which could certainly use the help.
If you want to see your picture front-paged, send me a jpeg and I’ll use it for an “Artists in Our Midst” post, okay?
Citizen Alan
My new standard for a McMegan post is called the “Abolish the TSA” test. Unless the McMegan post in question is as vapid, ignorant and insulting as Kain’s “Abolish the TSA” post from yesterday morning, I consider it hypocritical for Balloon Juice to mock it.
While it is amusing to see McMegan make fun of someone else’s innumeracy while ignoring her own (and it’s even funnier that she banned someone in the comments for pointing out her continual innumeracy), the post in question is still not as ignorant nor as suffused in libertarian hogwash as “Abolish the TSA.” Furthermore, it does look like she did some tiny amount of research, whereas Kain probably still thinks that prior to 9/11, each airline had its own private security force.
5 demerits.
Tom Levenson
@Citizen Alan: I refuse to surrender my right to mock McArdle for any reason whatsoever.
If you want my snark, you’ll have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
Citizen Alan
Also, for what it’s worth, I like the artwork. Adds a touch of class to the joint.
Citizen Alan
I didn’t say you couldn’t do it, Tom. I just said it was hypocritical to do so while Kain is wandering around the place, burbling inanely about how much easier it is to fire an incompetent private contractor than it is to reform a bureaucracy under the direct control of the executive branch. Then again, most people are hypocrites about something, so it’s not like it’s a terrible sin. Hell, it’s completely impossible to be a Republican without being a total hypocrite about one major issue or another.
Cris
That’s Tom’s calling card. He’s like a Batman villain. “The Curator.”
slag
@Tom Levenson: The only time I don’t like the artwork is when it doesn’t come with an explanatory link. Then, I have to go a-Googling to find it. And I’m lazy.
Next up, I will criticize someone else for being lazy. Oh wait. I just did that in the last thread. I have met the McMegan and she is me.
Southern Beale
OT but folks need to read this essay (link was via Digby) on why Julian Assange is releasing all of this info on WikiLeaks. There is a purpose and agenda behind it …
Mike in NC
In April 2011 the GOP House will introduce some form of resolution apologizing for the defeat of the Confederacy. Guaranteed.
Tim
@Anne Laurie:
@Tim: I think the pictures class up this joint, which could certainly use the help.
If you want to see your picture front-paged, send me a jpeg and I’ll use it for an “Artists in Our Midst” post, okay?
Oh…well…if you want to dork up the place with MY work, by all means: http://www.timotte.com
ruemara
@Tim:
Speak for yourself. I like it.
Jewish Steel
A Wittgenstein shout out. Another thing you don’t get over @ The Atlantic.
David Hunt
@Cris:
Okay. Cris wins the thread. All other posts are redundant.
Tom Levenson
@slag: Yikes. Sorry. Fixed.
scav
I’m still trying to wrap my brain around trying to comprehend how some are seemingly expecting a single, universally coherent and consistent position from a collective noun, any collective noun, let alone the local lot. Mentally insert a print from Escher here, preferably one with stairs and not the one of hands drawing each other.
Tom Levenson
@David Hunt: This.
slag
@Tom Levenson: Excellent. Thanks!
Cris
@Tim: I do find your work charming. May I backseat-web-develop you for a minute, though? Please put thumbnails of your paintings on the list pages, rather than 1500×1500 originals scaled down with the width/height attributes of the tag. It’ll load faster and give you more control over the thumbs.
Edit: wow, what a condescending jerk I am
Mojotron
What’s the “hypocritical” part? Should Tom refuse to post here as long as EDK does, or just ignore McMegan’s stupidity because someone else here posts foolish stuff? I’d rather have that mild “hypocrisy” than “foolish” consistency”.
lol
You need some Joseph Decreux in here.
Cackalacka
Wow.
I don’t know what is more unbelievable, her post, or her obtuse response/banning to the poster who Matthew 7:5’ed her.
And yes, Chris wins the thread.
Pangloss
@Sharl: He left out Hoover and Harding.
meh
boy McMegans takin it on the head over there – such a delight to watch…
Poopyman
@Pangloss: My thoughts exactly. Convenient, that.
arguingwithsignposts
Shopping in Philly Chinatown, The Somebody and I passed some abacuses, and immediately thought it would be delicious to send McArglebargle one as a small holiday gift. And we laughed, but then adopted a glibertarian mindset and decided she could get her own abacus. and we laughed and laughed.
Yes, I spend too much time here.
General Stuck
Front pagers get to post art or whatever else
long as Lord Tunch is pleased
It is written
Cris
@Sharl: Are we actually looking at the back of Lincoln’s head in that painting?
You know who else did that?
Citizen Alan
@Mojotron:
The latter. Making fun of McMegan has been a running joke here for a long time. Personally, I now find it somewhat hypocritical to do so when Kain is writing nonsense that’s just as bad. Frankly, it wouldn’t surprise me if it turned out Kain was one of McMegan’s pen names. `
Ailuridae
When Megan McArdle makes basic factual errors that lead to laughably silly conclusions she is rightfully confronted with heaping piles of scorn from Mr Levenson.
When ED Kain makes basic factual errors that lead to laughably silly conclusions ….
Must be the Y chromosome.
Tim
That’s kind of what I did. You know: speak for myself, by, you know, writing a comment that was written by me to, kind of express MY opinion, you know?
Tim
@Cris:
By all means condescend away. I am well aware that my site design sucks the major dongage. Do you design? Interested in a barter?
Citizen Alan
Tim, do you have a preference for Old Masters (I assume that is the right term for the artists you’ve been favoring, but I don’t have an art background) or will you be posting art from any other styles.
arguingwithsignposts
@Citizen Alan:
are you talking about Tom L., the FPer, or Tim the commenter?
PeakVT
@Ailuridae: The difference is that McAddled has made a career out of her lazy glibertarian drivel. E.D. is just some schmo who posts on some blogs.
Cris
@Tim: Lemme think about it. With pre-schoolers in the house, I don’t make time for much outside-the-office work these days.
Also, I’m not worth much on visual design; I’m an implementor. But as far as that goes, I think your site looks fine and probably just needs a bit of functional enhancement. You’re doing pretty well for what GoDaddy makes possible.
Cris
@arguingwithsignposts: or Tim the Enchanter?
Citizen Alan
@arguingwithsignposts:
D’oh! Tom Levenson, of course.
Crusty Dem
Now NcMegan’s going ban-crazy against mean spirited “liberal commentators”.
Oh Megan, it doesn’t take a liberal to hate you (though it doesn’t hurt, either), anyone with a basic commitment to factual accuracy will despise you, the fact that those are generally liberal is a sad political reality..
Barry
@Citizen Alan: “I just said it was hypocritical to do so while Kain is wandering around the place, burbling inanely about how much easier it is to fire an incompetent private contractor than it is to reform a bureaucracy under the direct control of the executive branch.”
OTOH, unless John is pulling down serious bucks from those Tunch-inspired items, ED is not getting paid for it.
McArdle is getting paid.
Downpuppy
I made a joke about one of her old errors & she corrected it.
The laws of the universe have been repealed.
PeakVT
It sounds like screenshots are in order when commenting at Mrs. Wingnut Welfare’s blog. I recommend MWSnap.
Tom Levenson
@Citizen Alan: Belatedly (I actually went out to a party this evening…what am I doing attempting a life here)…
Yup, I do take a lot of pleasure in old-master art, along with a lot of genre art from the last few centuries. But I love a lot of other styles and sources too. (Lots of Asian art in my viewing history, for example — and I do look there for some blog illustration as well.)
But you won’t see a ton of contemporary art on my posts for a couple of reasons. One, the most important, is the copyright problem. Older than 75 years, it’s there for the picking. Recent work, especially by living artists, not so much. You can find some under the varieties of open licenses, but it isn’t open season the way it is with the older stuff.
Second, I often use art in these posts to play a commentary role, which means that I tend to emphasize representational work over abstraction — which guides choices here as opposed to the range of stuff I might choose to look at on a Sunday at the museum. If I’m looking for an illustration, that goes double.
Ailuridae
@Citizen Alan:
This.
Platonicspoof
The Curator gets my internet vote for his calling cards too, if only because I associate them with the photoshopping at Sadly, No! (e.g., I’d anticipate the figure on the right to be Megan with an abacus from AWS).
And probably just as important as my internet vote, “Texas’s” was an eyeball speed bump to me.
If you scroll down to the Feb. 20th entry at the Houston Chronicle blog, Jim Newkirk makes a case, based on the AP stylebook, for not using a second letter ‘s’.
At the same time, there is a commenter there that interprets his source, Strunk and White, as saying your spelling can be correct.
/ Channelling my inner Adrian Monk and crossing my fingers that WP lets me edit.
Tom Levenson
@Platonicspoof: I’m usually a single “s” kind of guy, but when I typed Texas’ it just looked and (in my head) sounded wrong. Nice to know that Strunk and White support me, even if the AP style sheet does not.
And yes, I am deeply impressed by the high functioning OCD on display here. ;)
Tom Levenson
@Ailuridae: This doesn’t count, I suppose?
Life is too short to jump on everything that spikes my outrage meter — that’s what the community of commenters is for, to share the load. But if you are looking for the equivalence: since I started posting here at Balloon Juice I’ve done one long post dissecting an E. D. Kain argument politely, I hope, but with great gusto…and one short bit of easy snark at McArdle.
You make the call.
Ailuridae
@Tom Levenson:
Your post in relation to McArdle is IMO appropriately disdainful.
Your post in relation to Kain’s hackery is conciliatory by comparison. And Kain’s errors in that post are much more substantiative. They either stem from not understanding what a monopoly is or he’s being intellectually dishonest. That sole provider contracts from municipalities for trash pick-up are not monopolistic isn’t a matter of opinion; it is a matter of fact. And unlike McMegan, he can’t claim he fat-fingered the calculator.
Platonicspoof
@Tom Levenson:
Hopefully you’ve gone to bed by now, but as you say, it probably depends on the number of syllables and any difficulties in saying the possible spellings.
Since you not only blog, but write books, you probably already have more than enough grammar books and book editors. However, I googled (Googled?) “internet style guide” (Internet?), thinking it might be a running joke, like “blogger ethics panel”, and Yahoo (Yahoo!?) actually published one.
I’m sure it covers more than blogging.
Quiddity
Reporters not having a working knowledge of arithmetic adds up to a negative performance while covering issues that divide the nation, and can only result in a flawed journalistic product.
While these topics are admittedly complex, I don’t thinks it’s irrational to demand that reporters get to the root of the problems and shun the untested, imaginary solutions that look attractive but cannot succeed in the real world. That should be the cardinal rule for journalists. They should be able to differentiate between honest arguments and ideological foolishness.
The point is, if we base our actions around a continuous effort to thoroughly examine the various dimensions of policy options, we can surmount the limits presented by today’s partisan discord. In that way, we will be equal to the challenge of the twenty-first century.
Susan Of Texas
Way, way back when I was going to college, they told us to add ‘s when the word ended in s, unless it was traditional to just add the apostrophe. They also told us that different people/groups used different rules. So maybe you’ll see Jesus’ or Texas’s or the other way around-there doesn’t seem to be just one official way, at least in everyday usage. No wonder some people prefer math over English.
Not McArdle, obviously!
Kain is cursed with the “what if” disease, which is contracted through excessive exposure to science fiction as a child. (I used to irritate my high school biology teacher with what ifs, but I moved on in time.)
Megan McArdle
Um, I didn’t “actually write” what you have attributed to me, the Washington Post did. I did actually copy and paste it into a quote, but your attribution erroneously makes it seem like I was the author of the words in question.
Tom Levenson
@Megan McArdle: Indeed. See the correction at the top of the post.
arguingwithsignposts
@Tom Levenson: She still went there, Tom.
Susan Of Texas
Not that we shouldn’t be careful, but it would be more productive to address the substantive problems–claims on healthcare, income inequality, obesity and poverty.