The maddening thing about this isn’t simply that people were wrong, it’s that they won’t admit they were wrong. Or if they do, they were wrong for all the right reasons and the people who were right were right for the wrong reasons. At 20% unemployment they’ll be screaming “ALL IS WELL.” And they’ll continue to fail upwards. Also, too, Krugman is a smelly hippie.
When I read that, I thought back to one of the classics by the undisputed Grand Master of this sort of argument, our lady of the Gastric Calculator, who penned this gem after spending years supporting the Iraq War:
Since it failed, the more interesting question is not what did you get right, but what did you get wrong. The people who were right can (and will) rewrite their memories of what they believed to show themselves in the most attractive light; they will come to honestly believe that they were more prescient than they were. This is not some attack on people who were against the war: I was wrong, they were right. But everyone does this with almost everything–indeed, not rewriting memory in this way is so rare that there’s a clinical term for it. We call it “major depression”. They will also quite possibly simply be wrong about how they got it right; correct analysis often operates at a subconscious as well as a conscious level.
Sure, I was wrong, BUT THOSE PEOPLE SMELL LIKE PACHOULI!
There was also this classic with DougJ.
Cathyx
But being wrong on something so important and world changing is a big deal. And that is hard to overlook.
Redshift
Thanks to wingnut welfare, people who were wrong in a way that makes billionaires happy never have to admit they were wrong; they’ve got lifetime employment and impressive-sounding organizations that will put them forward as experts.
cmorenc
That’s the most convoluted “My judgment is still better than yours even though you were right and I was wrong” rationalization I’ve read in a long time. I’ll bet she was tempted to throw in the hoary line about “even stopped clocks are right twice a day, but my watch was only off five minutes”, but didn’t only because she wanted to avoid such an obvious cliche.
Linda Featheringill
Ya know, the study of history is a discipline. There are rules of evidence and guidelines. There are accepted ways of handling a subjective account. And this ain’t it:
General Stuck
Europe is way far away, both in distance and politics. They do have effect on the world and our economy, but they have a different political and economic past and present than we do. For them to fail, will surely hurt us here in the states, but a direct comparison between our political, social, and economic worlds, is fairly different.
Tomorrow we get our jobs report for April, and Europe will do whatever it is they are doing, and we will do what we do for whatever reason we do it.
And I love the Krugman, and want to have his babies. Swear to gawd.
Redshift
Actually, I have to disagree with Atrios — the maddening part isn’t that they won’t admit they were wrong (lots of people do that), it’s that their appearance in the public sphere doesn’t produce a reflexive response of “Are you insane? Why should anyone listen to you?”
Rick Massimo
I’m trying to decide whether the most perfect, most succinct illustration of McMegan is
(coming from someone who admits getting it wrong)
or (from the DougJ link):
Tough call.
dr. bloor
There’s also a DSM-IV diagnosis for those that are dead wrong and rewrite history to erase their wrongness. It’s called “Narcissistic Fuckwaddery.”
the fugitive uterus
The people who were right can (and will)
rewrite their memories of what they believed to show themselves in the most attractive light they will come to honestly believeremember that they were more prescient than you werefreelancer
Is gastritis also common amongst economic scorched-earth glibertarians who aren’t McMegan?
the fugitive uterus
what is she talking about?? i’ve tried to read that shit about 5 times now and i still come up with a big fat zero.
i’m still trying to get through this thing. it’s not easy. why do you to this to me?
General Stuck
Now that I have actually read the post, I was wrong about what I thought it said, but right in what I said, despite being wrong. I been trying for the past couple of hours to figure out what Freddie is talking about in his thread below, .
Baud
@General Stuck: But you admitted you were wrong and so therefore are not a very serious person.
Merp
I don’t know if this is accurate or not, but I’ve noticed a decline in McArdle bashing over the past few years from outposts that used to count that as a regular part of their output. Crooked Timber, LGM, etc. A few stalwarts like TBogg, SusanofTexas, and of course Tom Levenson have kept the faith, but overall church attendance rates (to coin a metaphor) are down.
Assuming this is right, why is it occurring? It’s not because McArdle is any less stupid, or making posts less offensive to the human spirit. Is it because people just get fed up with arguing basic math, economics, logic, philosophy, aesthetics, and ethics with her? But as she ascends the wingnut welfare ladder, demeaning every aspect of her professional existence is needed now more than ever.
David Koch
btw, big drop in jobless claims today (6.8%)
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/05/gm-profit-lower-jobless-claims-buoy-economy/
BGinCHI
The 1% benefits by being wrong. It brings them profits in an economy where the fix is in. That’s what Capitalism smells like in the not-so-teen-spirited year of 2012.
MattF
Evidence, schmevidence. Inference, schminference. Facts, schmacts. Logic, schmogic. You get the concept.
The correct response to being wrong is to demand that anyone who was right examine their consciences. “You were right, but were you good?”
Rick Massimo
@the fugitive uterus: “You think I’m wrong just because I’m wrong, but I’m only wrong because rightness is wrong.”
Followed by a few screensful of nonsense syllables in the hope that you’ll stop reading.
Comrade Dread
Anyway, it doesn’t even matter anymore who gets it right and who gets it wrong.
It’s all about who yells the loudest, is considered a very serious person, and who can persuade the rubes to do something profoundly stupid by making it sound attractive enough. As in: “Sure, Johnny, the odds of winning the lottery are only 1 in 300,000,000, but that’s why you’re going to spend all of your paycheck on lottery tickets. Why then your chances will surely go up!”
Same thing. “Sure, kids, cutting government spending in a recession may reduce overall GDP and increase unemployment as we fire a bunch of people to cut costs, but mom and dad have to make painful decisions too when dad loses his job. We need to spread the pain.”
It’s all sophistry that wouldn’t stand a chance against a rational critique, but people don’t want to be bored with facts. They want a solution from the gut that sounds right.
All that to say that we’re pretty much doomed as a civilization. But maybe after the collapse and a few millenia of living under feudalism we’ll have another Reformation and Enlightenment. So our descendents might get a better break.
General Stuck
@Baud:
Well, yea. Duh
pragmatism
no one can really know anything ever, except when a glibertarian tells you something. immediate takesies backsies available to glibertarians if that something proves to be wrong in any way.
the fugitive uterus
oh well, that was pretty much it. thank God, i was steeling myself with hard liquor. but i will never get those couple of minutes of my life back.
Tokyokie
I remember discussing the possibility of an Iraq war with a roomful of people the fall before the invasion, and I ticked off a checklist of why Saddam Hussein posed no threat to the United States and foretold pretty much precisely the disaster we would be entering. Pretty much all of them conceded pretty much all of my points but were pretty much of the opinion that we should go ahead and invade “to be on the safe side.” Like my childhood pediatrician who, every time I went in with a cold, always insisted on jabbing my butt with a dose of penicillin (to which I’m now allergic, thank you very much), “to be on the safe side,” even though penicillin does absolutely nothing to fight an illness caused by a virus (but does help create bacterial immunity to anti-bacterial agents).
And, of course, not a single one of those people has ever acknowledged that I was absolutely right, and they were, you know, wrong.
Baud
If being wrong is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
AA+ Bonds
Man, that shit is pathetic, “I was wrong and you were right but please remember that your being right is less relevant than my brave wrongdoing”
I have to admit that when it comes to Iraq and Afghanistan, I do take a little pleasure in how I was right not just on the morals but on the facts as well . . . but I think I deserve it
The fraud who wrote the quoted statement above, of course, is a narcissist and congratulates herself in the mirror for taking a shit
That sort of quote represents a constant monologue in her brain to maintain a fragile and self-harming illusion built over an extremely poor self-image
the fugitive uterus
so the people who were right have bad manners for acknowledging, even if only to themselves, that they were right. got it.
gaz
OT: Christ on a stick! What a nasty news day.
Apparently exercising your SYG rights in FL (by firing a single shot into the ceiling) gets you 20 if you are a black woman.
http://news.yahoo.com/why-couldnt-marissa-alexander-stand-her-ground-florida-162546331.html
ETA: mea culpa, this was posted May 1st
Catsy
@MattF:
In the context of wingnuts, it’s more like, “you were right, but were you ideologically correct? No? THEN YOU WERE WRONG LIBTARD!”
the fugitive uterus
@AA+ Bonds: we shouldn’t just take a little pleasure in it, we should put that sucker on and wear it like a big fat combat boot and rhetorically stomp them to pieces with it. just saying.
kdaug
Projection, much?
Tonal Crow
Christ on a crutch made of seventeen pieces of the True Cross and three swords of the Knights Templar is bullshit killing us.
gex
Say I have one surgeon who has studied the latest and greatest techniques, but kills all his patients. And I have another that uses slightly older techniques but has a much more reasonable mortality rate for his surgeries. I’m going with surgeon number two. No matter how pretty the technique (or argument) of the other surgeon.
ETA: The Village will go to surgeon number two, tell us all that surgeon one is better, and plus LASERS!
Linda Featheringill
OT, on to Romney.
I realize the Romney/Grenell have been discussed ad nauseum but this kind of blew my mind:
Bryan Fischer, issue director at the American Family Association, a conservative group opposed to same-sex marriage, bragged about his role in the episode. “It’s very clear from the Washington Post that he resigned because of pressure that was put on the Romney campaign by the pro-family community,” he said on his radio show, Focal Point. “So ladies and gentlemen, this is a huge win, and it’s a huge win for us in regard to Mitt Romney, because Mitt Romney has been forced to say, ‘Look, I overstepped my bounds here, I went outside my parameters here, I went off the reservation with this hire, the pro-family community has called me back to the table here, called me back inside the borders of the reservation.'”
Does that mean that Fischer & Co. are running the Republican Party?
ETA: I don’t know how to block quote in edit mode.
BGinCHI
@Linda Featheringill: Is Fischer related to the Fischer Nuts company?
Because he’s fucking nuts.
D0n Camillo
@Merp: Megan has been on sabbatical writing her new book “Permission to Suck” and has had guest posters filling in for her. Wait until she’s promoting her book and back to treating us with her latest brain droppings at the Atlantic. We should be back to our regularly scheduled McArdle whacking in no time flat.
Calouste
@gaz:
You have to kill the other person for Stand Your Ground to apply. /not really snark, it certainly helps to kill the one person who could contradict your testimony
And a mandatory 20 years for firing a warning shot? Where does that come from?
schrodinger's cat
OT: Linda Greenhouse has an interesting and well written blog post about the Supreme Court and Arizona’s mean spirited immigration law. So much better than both Bobos, chunky and non.
BGinCHI
@D0n Camillo: I thought her book was called “In the Kitchen with Dumbass”? Title change?
Rafer Janders
Assuming you were any kind of public commenter, the thing about the Internets is that you don’t get to rewrite your memories — what you wrote remains there, in black and white. If you were prescient, or if you weren’t, you can just look it up.
Now, this doesn’t mean that everyone won’t engage in a polite cover-up to pretend that you never said what you said…but it’s still there.
Linda
Hmmm. I guess a good prophylactic against depression is cluelessness. Also, it helps to know that unlike little people whose jobs have real consequences, like engineers or nurses, and whom you outearn by tons, you know that there are no career consequences for you, either. They just get canned, and McMegan never will.
Chris
@Linda:
There are a variety of articles out there stating that the average conservative is happier than the average liberal.
Your statement is why I believe it.
gex
@Linda: Pretty much. Studies have suggested the less deluded you are about yourself, the more depressed you are likely to be.
McMegan is world class delusional.
ETA: As are all the wannabe warriors too chickenshit to fight in these wars, but play tough guy on weekends playing paintball, stocking up on guns and ammo, and prepping their go bags.
The Dangerman
@dr. bloor:
Should that be spelled with just 1 D or with 2 D’s? Maybe I’m thinking of “Shitwadery” in a Shawshank kinda way.
gaz
@Calouste:
I haven’t read much about the incident, the only thing I can think of that makes this make ANY KIND of sense at all is if people lived above her.
ETA: In any case she should appeal this case as much as she can. I’m guessing it’s a good target for a reversal – unless people did live above her. Then maybe – still 20 years mandatory if that were the case seems crazy. At worst, if nobody died, it was reckless. Mandatory 20 minimum? smells fishy. On a weird note, her prosecutor is the same woman who his prosecuting Zimmerman.
Tonal Crow
@gex:
No! McMegan is not delusional. She is, instead, a world-class propagandist. She spouts bullshit because it advances her masters’ causes, for which they have given her lifetime wingnut-welfare tenure, full stop.
the fugitive uterus
since being wrong about Iraq is so admirable, i look forward to reading about everything she was wrong about and why she was wrong. because it’s “interesting.”
D0n Camillo
@BGinCHI: That could be a working title. Either way, it sure does sound like an autobiography.
Southern Beale
Speaking of the Iraq War and being wrong, Colin Powell has learned his lesson, sorta:
I dunno, calling bullshit on that. “THEY should have told me …” No, dude. You knew. You know you knew. You were too chickenshit to speak up, to resign, to do whatever you hda to do to dump a bucket of cold water on Darth Cheney’s plans to invade Iraq.
Goddamit if I knew that UN presentation was bullshit at the time, how could Colin Powell not no? I’m not that smart. He willed himself not to know.
AA+ Bonds
So if you’re curious what the NYPD is up to lately, it turns out they are smashing windows in New York City . . . with the heads of demonstrators
You can go ahead and scratch the “allegedly” in that overly safe Gothamist headline because the page hosts a video that very clearly shows the police officers deliberately smashing the window with the skull of the man in question
Their excuse is that supposedly someone (not the guy they beat up) threw a bottle; there is of course no evidence that this ever happened
AA+ Bonds
@the fugitive uterus:
Oh, I do – I just find that some people on here get a little . . . . antsy when I talk about it that way
It’s like I’m calling myself smarter and better informed than a bunch of important Democrats who voted for those wars (I am, because I am)
Linda
@Tonal Crow:
She may be a bullshitter about the rest of the world, but she and her class really believe that what they perform for a lot of money is both competently executed and important. That’s why they are genuinely hurt when people insinuate that they don’t deserve all they have.
4tehlulz
OT: Something is not right here:
Chinese Activist Chen Calls Into U.S. Congressional Hearing
If the Chinese gov’t had me “under seige,” how would I be able to call the US Congress just as a hearing about me was underway?
Xecky Gilchrist
Was it that same McArdle post that argued “well, we were wrong, but you forced us to be by being liberals so that even though you were right we had to oppose you, so really it’s your fault?”
Or was that some other (several) wingnuts?
the fugitive uterus
@AA+ Bonds: well, i’m not gonna browbeat anybody but i know what i do when i’m wrong about something and it’s not sit down and write an article about how awesome it is to be wrong about something as profound as the decision to invade Iraq. especially in retrospect. these people are lacking the “shame” gene.
Citizen_X
I’m sorry, what was that? I was busy amputating limbs mangled by cluster bombs and IEDs.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@David Koch:
but… but… Redstate was saying yesterday that Obama is making hay over Osama being dead to divert attention from the lousy jobs report that was expected today. Oh well, I’m sure that Blenderella will point out that even though Redstate was wrong, they were still right for being wrong.
Wingnut yin/yang is known as ying/yan.
Tonal Crow
@Linda:
It *is* competently executed propaganda and important to advance their masters’ plans. We cannot afford to confuse ourselves by referring to propagandists as “delusional”.
For example, what Sen. Inhofe spouts about global warming (it ain’t happening, and if it is, we ain’t causin’ it, and if we is, it ain’t bad…) is carefully-researched to serve the short-term interests of the carbon-extraction and -consumption industries. It is not delusion (which would involve a misperception of the world), but bullshit (which an assertion used to further some objective without reference to whether it’s true or false).
Republicans have become world-class bullshitters. And we’ve got to call them on it, every time, again and again and again, until the public instinctively equates “Republican” with “bullshit” and acts accordingly.
Hill Dweller
@4tehlulz: Yeah, something doesn’t smell right. There were reportedly multiple witnesses there when Chen agreed(multiple times) to stay in China and go to the hospital. Now he wants out.
Who fed him the phone number and time of the congressional hearing?
Mnemosyne
I think this Krugman column is even more apropos: “Death of a Fairy Tale”
He makes the very good point that the problem is not that the federal government embraced austerity, but that the states and municipalities embraced austerity with predictable results. The feds have done everything they could to mitigate that bad (or sometimes legally-required) decision by the states but it’s on the local level that austerity fever caught hold.
4tehlulz
@Hill Dweller: The People’s Liberation Army, probably.
There is no way that the phone call takes place unless the Chinese wanted to allow it.
hilzoy
Oh, why stop with McMegan? Why not Richard Cohen (about Iraq):
“I owe it to Tony Judt for giving me the French ex-Stalinist Pierre Courtade, who, wrongheaded though he might have been, neatly sums it all up for me: “You and your kind were wrong to be right; we were right to be wrong.””
I used to get mad about this stuff. Actually, I still do.
Roger Moore
@the fugitive uterus:
I think the idea is that you learn more from failure because it shows the limits of the system. This is something engineers will tell you; you have to keep pushing things until they break because breaking tells you a lot about what’s going on.
Of course that’s for physical systems under controlled conditions, not human systems in the field. They’ll be equally adamant that when analyzing the failure of a system that involves people, you have to look beyond the immediate cause of the failure and into underlying causes. You have to look at everyone who participated in the blunder and try to figure out how to keep the same kind of mistake from happening again. I’d say the first step would be to fire people like McMegan, but that’s just me.
Hill Dweller
FWIW, MSNBC is re-airing Brian Williams’ Bin Laden special at 8:00.
Ben Franklin
@AA+ Bonds:
Cop mentality never evolves. It is static, and Republican.
Tonal Crow
@4tehlulz: I detect a whiff of Republican ratfucking.
Citizen_X
To be fair, patchouli does suck.
schrodinger's cat
@Citizen_X: WTH is pachouli? I have only heard of it on Balloon Juice.
the fugitive uterus
@Roger Moore: that is the same thing as learning. you can learn from history without repeating it. as a matter of fact, it’s not a bad idea to take a peek at a history book now and then before deciding to make a war, like a lot of people did not do in the run up to the war. like this chick did not do. she could have saved a lot of us some valuable time we could have been spending plucking nose hairs
Smiling Mortician
@schrodinger’s cat: Hippie perfume, youngster. Smells kinda like pot, used to cover up the scent of actual pot, so . . . win/win!
bemused
An interesting book on self-deception on my shelf, Mistakes Were Made (but not by me), Why we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions, and hurtful acts. People dig in their heels harder in the face of hard facts.
Turgidson
@the fugitive uterus:
I think what that means is “you can’t prove I/Bush/right-wing douche of your choice fucked up and you can’t prove you/Obama/semi-decent liberal politician of your choice got something right, so I’ll go on being an insufferable moron with a clear conscience.”
Catsy
@Smiling Mortician: See, I don’t really understand why people still do that. Just about anyone you’d want to hide pot smell from knows what patchouli smells like and what it usually means if someone is using it. Unless you’ve been immersed in a room full of pot smoke your best approach is to eat a snack or drink some milk to wash away the oral odor, wash your hands and face with soap and water, and give your hair and clothes a quick swipe with a wet wipe or a damp paper towel. That only takes a minute or two, eliminates 99% of the smell and will even pass close inspection from a cop if you do it right.
Er, so I’ve heard.
Turgidson
@D0n Camillo:
Her sabbatical couldn’t have come at a better time. The brave souls who debunk her toxic brew of idiocy, lies, idiocy, mendacity, idiocy, and innumeracy, and idiocy were probably tired to the bone. Hopefully they’ll be refreshed and ready for her when she is back.
Donut
@the fugitive uterus:
Lol. I had that reaction when the original exchange occurred.
grandpa john
@Tokyokie: I would venture a guess that in that group of people who thought we should invade anyway, none of them were active duty military
Jebediah
@Linda Featheringill:
You have to type in the tags manually.
Lurking Canadian
@Xecky Gilchrist:
I think it was the one in which she claimed, “Sure, I was wrong, but none of the people I talked to predicted disaster in exactly the form that occurred, so really, they were just as wrong as I was.”
Of course, that claim may even be true, but it just means she didn’t talk to enough people, since just about everybody I was reading at the time (DFHs to a (wo)man, of course) predicted what happened with remarkable accuracy.
Lawnguylander
I was the rightest of all. Yet when I tell people that it’s almost like they don’t listen to another word I say.
TooManyJens
@Hill Dweller:
I heard that they called him.
This whole thing is very weird.
Bob2
@D0n Camillo:
You know her book is on failure right?
“Since it failed, the more interesting question is not what did you get right, but what did you get wrong. The people who were right can (and will) rewrite their memories of what they believed to show themselves in the most attractive light; they will come to honestly believe that they were more prescient than they were. This is not some attack on people who were against the war: I was wrong, they were right. But everyone does this with almost everything—indeed, not rewriting memory in this way is so rare that there’s a clinical term for it. We call it “major depression”. They will also quite possibly simply be wrong about how they got it right; correct analysis often operates at a subconscious as well as a conscious level.”
Requoting her.
asiangrrlMN
You know what? Fuck that bitch. Fuck her sideways ten ways of Sunday with my very rusty pitchfork™. I knew they were wrong about Iraq, and I knew exactly why they were wrong. I can’t fucking believe she gets paid to write that shit. Paid a shitload of money, too. I was fucking right, dumbass, and you were fucking wrong. Suck. on. that. Bitch.
She reeeeally rubs me the wrong way.
@Southern Beale: What you said. I knew it was bullshit at the time, and so should have he. That’s my default response – if I, a lowly citizen with no intel knew it was bullshit at the time, anyone higher up the food chain should have known it, too.
Cris (without an H)
Oh man, that exchange between DougJ and McMegan on DeLong’s blog is beautiful. I love that he persistently attacks her on simple matters of fact and arithmetic, but the best is the final payoff.
RSA
I wonder if Megan realizes that she’s putting forth an argument for ignoring everything she’s ever gotten right as an opinion columnist? (Assuming the existence of such.) We could have this discussion about a lot more than the Iraq war.
I also think that the more general argument is characteristic of a lot of libertarian thinking. If some prediction turns out to be wrong, that’s okay, because it’s based on “correct” principles.
Tokyokie
@grandpa john: Actually one of them was, an Air Force E-9. I give him a pass because he has to believe in the existence of existential threats to the country’s existence to justify his career. The others, not so much.
Rob in CT
I’m still so angry about it. I knew – me, just a regular guy – I FUCKING KNEW they were bullshitting us. It was obvious.
Ok, so some people’s BS detectors aren’t as highly developed (talking private citizens here, not Jane Galt), so they foolishly believed the Bushies. They eventually figured it out, after a lot of death and destruction. Most of them, however, will listen to the VSPs next time. And there will be a next time.
And next time, instead of just complaining online, I’ll get off my but and protest more vigorously. AND IT WON’T MATTER.
Arrrrrrrrgggggghhhhhhhh.
Eric
I must say though, Pachouli actually does make me like people less
Cerberus
It’s because to an unfortunately large number of people, the worst thing you can do is back down and change your mind. That makes you “wishy-washy”, “flighty”, a “flip-flopper”, who must never ever be taken seriously again.
If you are absolutely wrong and refuse to change your mind even if all of reality, everyone in the world, and the Holy Trinity came and shoved your nose in it, you are “confident”, have “moral clarity”, “unbending”, “rock hard”.
If you’re thinking the latter seem to be describing penises rather than people, congratulations, you’ve pieced together the why. Stubbornness is seen as more “masculine” than reasoned response to information and so is valued more entirely because of that perceived “masculinity” (actual connection to actual masculinity or even actual men is entirely coincidental at best).
Fixing this bullshit would be key to fixing a lot of problems including our broken media and the disrespect scientists and other “eggheads” are given by the general population.