I’m visiting my sister in Portland, OR for Thanksgiving and even at the supermarket where real Murkins shop, they have this kind of shit.
You think that I’ve got no respect
A bunch of you have told me that I should stop making fun of Megan McArdle, that she’s beneath me and not worth it, but come on, this is too good not to pass along (via).
Suspect that there’s a non-zero chance that Romney’s 47% remark turns out to be quite popular with swing voters.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) September 19, 2012
The full McArdle
Everyone’d bee emailing me about this: Naked Capitalism Project S.H.A.M.E Naked Capitalism has a full rundown on the life and times of Megan McArdle. The opening:
Megan McArdle is a Koch-trained conservative activist working as a business journalist and pundit. She earned her MBA from the University of Chicago, received journalism training at the Kochs’ flagship libertarian think-tank, the Institute for Humane Studies, and has used her position at The Atlantic and, most recently, Newsweek/The Daily Beast, to run cover for and promote Koch interests and the Republican Party agenda. In early 2009, a GOP outfit backed by the Kochs hailed McArdle for her “leadership role in … re-branding the Republican party.” McArdle continues to conceal the extent of her deeply conflicted relationships with the Koch influence-peddling machine.
Not to toot my own horn but I feel that my take-down of her Iraq War cost estimates was probably my best work.
Kill the Beast, kill it
After a brief gastritis-induced hiatus, Megan McArdle has resumed (via) her reign of terror at her new Daily Beast digs. FDR is a an “economic idiot” because shut up, that’s why. I liked this comment summing up glibertarian economic ideas:
I’ve started to think that the whole point of Libertarian economics is to generate enough science-y sounding “theories” that they can ignore empirical evidence. FDR’s an idiot, we can prove it, no need to look at boring stuff like economic outcomes.
More and more, I subscribe to the honeypot theory of the Daily Beast. Tina Brown is gathering all the empty, inane second-to-third tier pundits together in one place. Fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here.
Rising to the Bait — Sort Of
Zandar is playing with me.
The divine Ms. M is packing up her toys and heading off to Tina Brown’s playpen for the formerly hip.
Zandar wants me to go medieval on somebody — McArdle, Brown, whoever. But I won’t, because I am going to be busy popping popcorn. I do not think this marriage will end well.
Why?
You may well ask.
Wrong is Better than Right if It’s the Right Kind of Wrong
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.
Wrong is Better than Right if It’s the Right Kind of WrongPost + Comments (87)
Open Thread: Yes – let the joyous news be spread!
I see that Megan has some flying monkeys in from the Cato Institute to run her blog while she is off on her broomstick on a salt-mining expedition in Nepal or hunting down the elusive gold Thermomix in the wilds of Manhattan.
I daren’t look too closely. Are the walls over there even more shit smeared than usual?
Open Thread: Yes – let the joyous news be spread!Post + Comments (19)