Parasites Become Predators!
Posted on February 26th, 2009 by HTML Mencken
Shorter Megan McArdle
Above: “Moreover, I myself prefer to burn off leeches with a
stylish Colibri lighter, but ymmv.”
- This economic crisis, like perhaps every other, comes from an inversion of normal Social Darwinist order: the strong but trusting were duped by the weak but devious; parasites did not ‘perish as they should’ — or rather, they did but they killed their hosts as well. But then such perversions of nature are inevitable when collectivists alter the economic ecosystem, when they suspend the properly-applying law of the jungle and instead force Randian supermen to give loans to duplicitous jungle bunnies.
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
It’s hard for me to reconcile the fact that she could make more money as a prostitute than writing for The Atlantic, with her “libertarian” ideals. Surely it is in her rational self-interest to eat a bushel of dicks at today’s market prices!
I hate it when they just pay lip service to their ideology.
But, but, but….
Yeah, because the current crisis was caused by millions of Americans moving in with their boyfriends. I mean, duh.
A witless consumer of AEI propaganda.
Who knows better that the one year teaser rate that got you into your house is going to turn into a payment you can’t affford once it starts floating at a jillion over LIBOR…you or the banker who sold it off to a Wall Street CDO packager and never gave another crap about it?
The astonishing thing about this imbecile is that anyone pays any attention to her at all. Leave that to her purported boyfriend.
Yeah, because the current crisis was caused by millions of Americans moving in with their boyfriends. I mean, duh.
That was my take. Which seems more likely:
A) Millions of ordinary people, unknown to each other, suddenly decided to play a prank on the banking industry by misrepresenting their assets, marriage prospects, and grooming habits to their local loan officer (an idea that had never occurred to anyone before.) Having always behaved rationally, the highly intelligent and industrious decision-makers of our economy were as unprepared for such bestial behavior as a woman who suddenly finds her face being torn off by a pet chimp.
B) Millions of groupthink idiots have been pushed along from “upper middle class” families to elite colleges to jobs in the financial sector without ever suspecting their own mediocrity. A few of the larger birds flew into an airplane engine, and the rest of the flock cheerfully followed.
The solution to A is, don’t let monkey people into the house. Since Megan has been clamoring for that anyway, let’s just go with that.
Wow. I mean, really – just wow. What terrific fail, all wrapped up in the shortest of short “opinion pieces” – most of which is a cut-&-pasted post from Matt Yglesias.
We all know that banks, just ask one question on a loan form – “You make enough money to pay this loan bac– well, look at me asking these silly questions again! Just sign here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and there we go! Enjoy your new home!”
good lord, and the comments are even more comedic gold – schlobbing mcaddled’s putative knob by acknowledging and praising her “moral clarity” – like she’s a fine Chateau du Boone…
How much Darwinistic strength does it take to be a cheesy columnist?
Megan could be a character on Gossip Girl if she wasn’t too old for the part of upper crust senior high school brat.
It saddens me that this beeotch is still employed and real journalists are losing jobs at papers that give half a damn about reporting.
We all know that banks, just ask one question on a loan form – “You make enough money to pay this loan bac– well, look at me asking these silly questions again! Just sign here,
They WOULD ask more questions, but taxes and Democrats force them to give affirmative action loans to people that don’t deserve them. Now if there were no taxes and no Democrats, why, there would be enough extra money to build a house for everyone!
Oh, my.
I wasn’t going to bother to read the drivel until I saw that and thought, “No. not even she can possibly be that unaware of the very current events about which she is writing.”
My bad.
The only video of Megan I’d ever recommend anyone actually watch.
It’s just fun.
*sigh*
Can I cash in my one free pig point here with the justification of severe drunkenness and note that every single time Megan McArdle is mentioned here I die a little inside because I have a thing for tall gawky brunettes with big ears and I think she’s super-cute, and that it’s depressing to me that she’s such a terrific dumbasshole in much the same way that, e.g., a lefty with a thing for skeletal blondes might be conflicted about Ann Coulter? OK, I will not ever say anything about this again, thanx.
Having always behaved rationally, the highly intelligent and industrious decision-makers of our economy were as unprepared for such bestial behavior as a woman who suddenly finds her face being torn off by a pet chimp.
Win^2
djur, 10 minutes in a tea room with that idiot and you’d forget that thing you have.
The only video of Megan I’d ever recommend anyone actually watch.
She was actually holding here own there IMO. The basic measure of make-work is labor not creating added value.
There were a lot of words in that clip that could have been avoided if Baker could have engaged McCardle on that front to get her to abandon that “any government jobs program = make work” attack.
As long as actual value is being created by this labor, IMO in times of economic recession it doesn’t matter economically if the money paid for this labor is coming from savings, taxes, or just printed. The important thing is to not waste see productivity go wasted.
The problem with people like McArdle is that they don’t want to believe that the rich are the poor with money for much the same reason we might like to believe we’re the product of a loving home or that the country we were born into is a basically good one.
Like the last thing, it becomes a problem when you systematically try and turn it into policy. Because McArdle wants to feel like she earned her trust fund, obviously the poor aren’t fit to manage their money. How could it possibly be otherwise?
While make-work is something that should be avoided if possible, it’s no fundamentally different from tax cuts in getting money into the economy. But funny how nobody on the right whines about big government crooks forcing make-income on diligent American investors.
she’s a fine Chateau du Boone…
Ah yes. Watt’s bread in the Beaune comes out in the flash.
Sorry. That comes from my comprehensive mental database of punchlines, but I cannot remember the jokes that go with any of them.
My favorite thing about that video clip is that her position is to argue against a return to the WPA and she ends by essentially asking, “If the WPA is so great, why don’t we still have it?”
Well, yeah.
Clearly, she missed this little nugget.
that there are people like McArdle.
“But then such perversions of nature are inevitable when collectivists alter the economic ecosystem, when they suspend the properly-applying law of the jungle and instead force Randian supermen to give loans to duplicitous jungle bunnies.”
This sentence, my friend, is a work of art. Thanks.
I feel your pain. Though you probably won’t believe it considering my many Marie Jon posts, her physical type is not normally my thing. But Malkin? Yeah. And don’t even get me started on Amanda Carpenter.
Or I should say, “not normally to my taste.”
No.
Gah. I’m really trying not to be lewd here. But words won’t cooperate.
You know what I mean.
I feel your pain.
I can’t say that I do. I can understand it, theoretically, but there doesn’t seem to be a single attractive male wingnut. Really, not even one.
there doesn’t seem to be a single attractive male wingnut. Really, not even one.
That’s because if your target audience is a bunch of unattractive males, you don’t want to alienate them by showing them attractive males. If wingnut males feel the urge to see an attractive male for reasons they can’t quite describe but that make them feel funny inside, they need to place it in a fantasy context by watching, say, Heartbreak Ridge (a far gayer movie than Top Gun).
Leave that to her purported boyfriend.
Do you not mean imaginary boyfreind?
In that video where she is making a tit of herself, do you suppose those are real books behind her or not?
I told ya B.M. Matt, that you’d regret not spitting in her face. It was the one small thing I asked that you do before leaving the offices of the Atlantic. I mean, you had to share office space with that brainless wonder – and when you finally had the chance to escape,and the perfect opportunity to hock up a slimy loogie…
This sort of thing is going to haunt you forever Mr. Yglesias – she sees you as a colleague – well actually as the “dumb guy who used to sit at that desk over there before they shit-canned him”. That’s her view of the story now, so whenever you write anything about whatever is tickling ME-gan’s fancy – you’ll have this sort of shit to deal with.
The convo:
Matt Y. – Hey, all these dicks saying that deadbeat mortgage takers are the real ones at fault aren’t really looking at what was going on. The bank told these folks that this loan was good. Professional bankers were offering money – and on terms that them bankers specifically drew up them own selves. So Mr. or Mrs. Only-Qualify-For-A-Sub-Prime looks at the paperwork, and they probably don’t even think “why would the bank offer me money they know they don’t have a chance of ever getting back”.
ME-gan – Matty, U R dummee. Of course it’s the borrowers at fault, because they are poor, so I hate them. Doy.
Matt – Fuck. I shoulda spit in her face when I had the chance.
I mean holy figgin’ fuck. Even her “gotcha” line hasn’t any fucking weight to it whatsoever:
That’s your trump card McArdle? That’s your fucking rationalization for why the borrowers should bear the fucking blame?
THE FUCKING BANKS KNOW MORE ABOUT FUTURE INCOME PROSPECTS. They write out fucking zillions of loans and mortgages EVERY FUCKING DAY.
You know whay, you stupid fucking little shit – “determining a person’s ability to pay back loans” – THAT’S THE BANK’S FUCKING JOB. THAT’S WHAT A BANK DOES.
ARRGHGGHHHGLE BARGLE BLART! No more ME-gan for me until at least this first coffee of the day.
Are bankers somehow more aware than ordinary Americans that recessions happen, companies fold, people lose their jobs?
Yes dear, because RISK MANAGEMENT IS THEIR FUCKING JOB.
This whole “people that have a job doing x should know more about x than the average schlub” thing is totally lost on trust fund baby McArdle.
Aw dammit, not even an mba, you stole my thunder.
You even USED ALL CAPS TOO! And an F-BOMB! I guess it’s true that we’re all genetically-modified-gay-aborted-Islamoatheists that have been brainwashed by Teh Soros.
I for one always walk into my banker’s office and say:
“Pardon me good sir, but would you happen to have any loans today that I could never hope to pay off as long as I live?”
Clearer HTML Mencken:
“In a nod to my hick, backwoods, redneck forebearers I’ll take every opportunity to use “jungle bunnies” or any other racial epithet to describe brown folks, careful to couch it in satirical language in order to maintain my progressive bona fides.”
Concern troll is concerned.
I just watched the video and by Megan’s own measure she is unemployed.
Megan’s job is to sput confusing and wrong crap so people will continue to give money to the rich. She’s very successful at it. She thinks her job is to educate the common, stupid man about the economy with her super amazing University of Chicago MBA skillz. She’s very bad at it, which makes her hysterically funny.
Can I cash in my one free pig point here with the justification of severe drunkenness and note that every single time Megan McArdle is mentioned here I die a little inside because I have a thing for tall gawky brunettes with big ears and I think she’s super-cute, and that it’s depressing to me that she’s such a terrific dumbasshole in much the same way that, e.g., a lefty with a thing for skeletal blondes might be conflicted about Ann Coulter? OK, I will not ever say anything about this again, thanx.
I have to protest here.
You’re saying “well, I find her physically attractive but her personality and ideas are horrible.” In other words, you recognize that McArdle is more than her looks, and you can separate her looks (attractive to you personally because of her “type”) from her “self” (dumbass). This isn’t a “pig” statement at all. In fact, I’d have to call it an “anti-pig” statement.
See, a “pig” statement would be more like, “Wow, she’s a total dumbass, but who cares? She’s hot, and that’s all that matters!”
Or maybe “I’m sorry–did Megan say something? I was too busy looking at her tits.”
Or the ubiquitous “I’d tap that.”
Honestly, I can’t see anything wrong with saying “I’m really conflicted by Megan because I think she’s really hot but I find her beliefs repugnant and her thought processes sorely lacking in, well, thought.”
Can I cash in my one free pig point here with the justification of severe drunkenness and note that every single time Megan McArdle is mentioned here I die a little inside because I have a thing for tall gawky brunettes with big ears and I think she’s super-cute, and that it’s depressing to me that she’s such a terrific dumbasshole in much the same way that, e.g., a lefty with a thing for skeletal blondes might be conflicted about Ann Coulter? OK, I will not ever say anything about this again, thanx.
Seconded. All of it, including the bit about not ever saying anything about this again.
Well, after I observe that the low-alto voice is good for me too.
I’m done now.
What Dorothy said. True pigs have no complexity, no self-awareness, no capacity for such differentiation. You guys R doin’ it right.
We’ve had conversations before here at S,N over feeling physically attracted to conservative a-holes. I recall confessing with abundant shame how I my own self found Tucker Carlson to be cute as a button, bow-tie and all, what with those button eyes and mop of dark hair. Not that I’d ever want to be in the same room with the fucktard, but still, there it is. Fortunately, the no. of physically attractive males who are also conservative shows as an outlier on any scale.
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?
The public and private sectors are intertwined; libertarians pretend they’re not.
Above post referring to that entertaining yet infuriating video linked to above.
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.
McArdle pwned
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press_archive?month=02&year=2009&base_name=post_2
Aw, nobody’s attracted to AC?
Sexual attraction does not respect ideological boundaries.
Tara Tedrow!!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think you’re being unfair to Megan but whatever, it’s still hilarious.
Djur, Mr Mencken, I feel your pain. Maybe we can form a support group.
“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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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?
They like Darwin now ?
How about “Social Intelligent Design” ? Surely it would make more sense…
Oh wait, never mind!