Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

The choice is between normal and crazy.

It looks like winning debates is a black job!

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

White supremacy is terrorism.

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

Not all heroes wear capes.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

Fear or fury? The choice is ours.

Republicans: “Abortion is murder but you can take a bus to get one.” Easy peasy.

People are weird.

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” is supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

You are here: Home / The Pot Calls The Kettle A Pot

The Pot Calls The Kettle A Pot

by | 41 Comments

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I think we should all take a moment to admire the self-control that it took for Kevin Drum to write a thoughtful, scholarly response to a McMegan rant without noting even once how precious it is for Mcardlebargle to complain that someone else needs a fact checker.

BTW, I’m serious about the self-control thing. I don’t know how he does it. But if you read his very next post, it probably helps explain why Kevin is a pro and I’m stealing time at work.

BTW x2: speaking of work! One the the Nature journals just said yes. To celebrate, here’s another pic of Max.

***Update***

Sorry about the first link. Fixed now.

***Update 2***

To everyone who asked, the paper is in one of the Nature journals and not in Nature itself. Send me an email if you want to know more and I’ll be happy to talk about it.

Reader Interactions

41Comments

  7. 7.

    dmsilev

    Congrats! Did you make _Nature_ itself, or are you in one of the field-specific journals? Either way, it’s quite something.

    dms

  8. 8.

    Comrade Mary

    Yay for Nature [group]!

    God, Max is adorable. Doesn’t he know he’s supposed to reduce people to pee-soaked terror?

  9. 9.

    danimal

    Tim F swallowed the bait? I would have bet my mortgage payment on DougJ, son of DougJ. Nevertheless, my faith in the BJ frontpagers to comment on the ridiculous is affirmed. And yes, Drum is ill-suited for the blogosphere; he has self-control in abundance.

    My irony-meter exploded when I saw McMegan spew that post. I guess it’s important that the Atlantic has fact-checkers but not so important that they catch factual errors. Good gig if you can get it.

  11. 11.

    Comrade Mary

    This Radiolab podcast has a great summation of some of this research (on self control in kids, not the Functional architecture of the retromer cargo-recognition complex).

    ::places two marshmallows in thread, sneaks out again::

  15. 15.

    Southern Beale

    I didn’t get a “thoughtful, scholarly response to a McMegan rant” in that link. I got a request for a subscription to Nature.

    Can someone tell me what this is about? Clif’s Notes edition?

  17. 17.

    PurpleGirl

    Congrats on the Nature article.

    Max is gorgeous. May he be your loving marshmallow for a long time.

  18. 18.

    J.W. Hamner

    It is indeed hard not to laugh when you read McCardle say something like this:

    It is, as any writer can attest, startlingly easy for a bad fact–like Fiat buying GM–to insert itself so thoroughly into your consciousness that you don’t even know you ought to look it up.

    Just like they magically insert themselves into your calculator. I love that errors have their own agency independent of the author.

    As a sort of aside, please tell me McCardle isn’t writing a book and that’s why she is thinking about fact checking.

  20. 20.

    Violet

    Congrats on the Nature article! That’s the big time, baby!

    Max is the cutest thing ever.

    As I said in a comment on McMegan’s post last night:

    she’s predictably hypocritical McMegan: claim to follow certain principles (“markets work best”) and then behave however she wants, especially doing whatever is in her own best interests. In this case sucking up to the Atlantic (her employer) is a smart, self-serving thing to do, hence the “doing the right thing” ego-stroking comment. But everyone else really should follow that awesome markets-solve-everything principle.

    As with most people who claim to be “conservatives,” it’s all about them. The Virtue of Selfishness, indeed.

  21. 21.

    Ken in MS

    We are on Doberman #3. And everyone who visits is absolutely amazed at how great they are as housepets. Sweet, funny, and intelligent. We’ve never had a red, though, just two blacks and a blue.

  22. 22.

    cmorenc

    @ danimal :

    My irony-meter exploded when I saw McMegan spew that post. I guess it’s important that the Atlantic has fact-checkers but not so important that they catch factual errors. Good gig if you can get it.

    What…if….McMegan’s real job at the Atlantic (the one they’re actually paying her for) is to be one of their fact-checkers? And the “economics” editor thing is just a vanity gig they gave her just to stoke whomever the magazine’s real editors were paying back favors to, one that kinda grew a bit out of control?

    OK, so that’s a bit of a hypothetical stretch. However, if true, that might explain a lot if too many outfits are giving out those “fact-checker” jobs to people like McMegan as plums for connected people’s otherwise difficult-to-employ relatives and friends.

  33. 33.

    Hypusine

    Congratulations on the Nature paper, Tim, and thanks for the great posts in general.

    Was it a Nature group journal, the OG big momma – or are you finally coming clean about that weird I-need-to-marry-abstract-concepts thing?

  34. 34.

    MonkeyBoy

    As a lawyer, attorney general DeWine’s first question after the accident was “Can I sue him?”. His second question was “Can he sue me?”. The answer to this, DeWine being the owner of the car, was yes, so DeWine made sure that Kirk was examined by a doctor who pronounced him uninjured and thus he couldn’t later hook up with a shyster lawyer who gets Kirk to claim a back injury requiring a sizable compensation.

    There is nothing compassionate about this at all.

  36. 36.

    Comrade Mary

    @cathyx: You’re a natural-born fact-checker. Not a natural-born McMegan. My deepest apologies if I appeared to imply the latter.

  37. 37.

    Gina

    Nice doggie! He definitely needs to be on BJ more often, what a cutie. Oh, and good on ya for that worky-science thing ;-)

  40. 40.

    Prof. Poirot

    Not in Nature, but in one of the Nature journals? That’s close enough for me! You’re still awesome!

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