Comments on: Parasites Become Predators!

By: Renmiri

Renmiri — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 23:54:51 +0000

They like Darwin now ?

How about “Social Intelligent Design” ? Surely it would make more sense…

Oh wait, never mind!

By: Jrod

Jrod — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 02:14:11 +0000

I like the bit in the video where McAddled suggested that we transform welfare recipients into the employed by saying we’re paying them to run their sprinklers. That’s one idea, sure. Another one is to pay them to do a bunch of shit that the free market won’t touch, like rebuilding and repairing our infrastructure, restructuring our health care system, teaching the next generation properly, and things like that.

But then again, what’s a parasite like me know?

By: Doctorb

Doctorb — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 01:38:28 +0000

As an aside, nobody has pointed out that parasitism (the real kind, in nature) is a probably unavoidable product of evolution (“Darwinism”), so why should the strained analogy of “Social Darwinism” not also include parasites? I mean, jeez.

By: Dr Zen

Dr Zen — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:18:33 +0000

Libertarians think we should start from the point they got rich. If we had to start with nothing but our own productive capacity, I guarantee Ms McArsole would become a communist right then and there.

By: Mr. Wonderful

Mr. Wonderful — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 21:26:38 +0000

“Does she think they were built by fairies one night?”

Yes. This is what I mean when I say libertarians are ahistorical. They talk as though society was invented the day they finished reading Uncle Miltie. “Let’s all start HERE and let the best man/woman/men/women win!” There is no here. Their notion of society is as atavistic as Ptolemaic astronomy.

By: Dain Brammaged

Dain Brammaged — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:57:48 +0000

Djur, I think the attraction is mutual. If you read between the lines, all these girls(AC, Malkin, McArdle) spend volumes trying to deny their obsessive fascination with all that is hippy, long-haired, guitar slinging, gay abortionist dudeness. It just kills them that Joe the Plumber is not George Clooney. They want us so bad, it’s driving them batshit crazy.

By: Smut Clyde

Smut Clyde — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:52:07 +0000

“When you pour out the last drop from the Cup Of Logic, the cup is full of Wingnut.”

Fill up the kindness cups
Drink up the finest drops

No, I don’t have a problem. I can stop quoting Wire lyrics any time.

By: Big Bad Bald Bastard

Big Bad Bald Bastard — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:19:27 +0000

Djur, Mr Mencken, I feel your pain. Maybe we can form a support group.

By: Xanthippas

Xanthippas — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:04:41 +0000

I think you’re being unfair to Megan but whatever, it’s still hilarious.

By: jim

jim — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 19:08:04 +0000

She says what numerous like-minded dolts want to hear, couched in terms that leave light-years of wiggle-room when she gets called out on her weak shit – that video is a case-in-point. If her opponent had pointed out that many New Deal “make-work” projects did in fact add real value, she’d've slithered around trying to come up with an exclusionary definition of “value” to protect her ideological card-house from the tornado of reality, just like she did for work.

It’s the Tao of Wingnut.

“The bullshit that can be smelled is not the true bullshit.”

“When you pour out the last drop from the Cup Of Logic, the cup is full of Wingnut.”

etc.

By: Dr. BDH

Dr. BDH — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:17:37 +0000

Now comes Sarah Palin, who has opened a positive channel for all the long suppressed feelings to erupt and bring victory in November. Tara Tedrow

Maybe, unlike Bill Kristol, Ms. Tedrow had the good sense to quit after she totally blew the predicting victory thing.

By: Dr. BDH

Dr. BDH — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:08:39 +0000

She was actually holding here [sic] own there IMO. Yeah, if “holding your own” means talking over the other guy and refusing to answer his questions. And listen, Argumentation 101, first day, you learn that you can’t have an argument if you can’t agree on the definitions of the terms you wish to debate. McArdle can’t define “employment” or “make-work” in any way an educated person would accept, so all she has is rudeness.

By: tigrismus

tigrismus — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:01:52 +0000

The TVA, too, created jobs and lifted large parts of the South out of third world conditions. Libertarians know nothing about economics and even less about history.

By: Lawnguylander

Lawnguylander — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 17:48:25 +0000

It may have been mentioned before in other posts, but all of McArdle’s ‘libertarian’ ideology can be shown for what it is by one example: the fucking Hoover Dam. If we’d waited for market forces to provide ‘real jobs’ to construct the thing, if infrastructure projects were all ‘make work’, then where’d the damn American southwest be right now, economically?

She says in that video adb linked to that, “we know that the WPA created work to provide jobs, not to do the work.” She shouldn’t even need to think beyond her own home city to figure out that she’s talking shit. I wonder if she knows that Fiorello LaGuardia got his eponymous airport, the one she no doubt flies out of regularly, built with a lot of help from WPA funds. Or that the bridge she cabs it across to get there, the Triborough, was also funded by the WPA. And on and on. Does she think they were built by fairies one night? I guess the thousands of jobs that were created outside of NYC to provide materials for those projects bridge were fake too, they must not have really shipped all that, steel lumber and concrete making material on trains, trucks and boats up here. Instead they buried it all in a giant hole in the ground when they finished processing it. It’s an everlasting shame that LaGuardia and Robert Moses were so anti mass transit but I would love it if Megan had to live in an alternate universe. One where NYC has a pre WPA infrastructure. Dumbass.

By: Rusty Shackleford

Rusty Shackleford — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 17:42:08 +0000

Aw, nobody’s attracted to AC?

I know a deeply closeted homosexual who is. His excuse for not dating is that he’s holding out for Coulter. I am not making this up.

By: Righteous Bubba

Righteous Bubba — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 17:19:02 +0000

Tara Tedrow!!!

So like T. Boone Pickens, I say drill, drill, drill on Sarah Palin.

God I wish she was still writing, but I think she has a job now and they probably don't let her write things like that any more.

By: Rusty Shackleford

Rusty Shackleford — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 17:05:54 +0000

Sexual attraction does not respect ideological boundaries.

By: Lesley

Lesley — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 17:03:56 +0000

Aw, nobody’s attracted to AC?

By: todd

todd — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 16:59:45 +0000

McArdle pwned
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press_archive?month=02&year=2009&base_name=post_2

By: FlipYrWhig

FlipYrWhig — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 16:54:34 +0000

You know, I read Matt Yglesias’s blog, off and on, and feel at his best he’s _somewhat_ interesting. Never _very_ interesting, but occasionally somewhat so. So to my mind, that’s where the bar should be set: you must be at least as interesting as Matt Yglesias to get paid for blogging. Consequently, I don’t know how the holy fuckdoodle Megan McArdle got this kind of gig. She’s just plain uninteresting, un-self-aware, and pretentious, in the manner of every college sophomore who just took a philosophy course.