Sickening

I was already feeling unwell today and reading this didn't help. Megan McArdle says that criminals are sub-normal creatures easily identified by sight. Perhaps they have beady, furtive eyes, or are wearing striped pajamas with an iron ball and chair around their ankles. Who knows? The point is that they are not us, and since McArdle wouldn't kill anyone with a gun, neither would anyone else. This was the same reasoning she used with Iraq. She said that if she were Hussein she would have had WMD, therefore despite any and all evidence to the contrary, Hussein had nuclear weapons and was going to use them. McArdle promised to reexamine her thought processes and identify the cognitive bias that created this unhappy mistake, but she must have been too busy, or maybe just forgot.

I was going to quote some stupid at random, but the whole post is so monumentally stupid, so rancidly centered around the isolated bubble that is McArdle's life, that I really can't single out one thing. Nothing exists for McArdle outside of her own head, her own experiences. It's like going to a dog for advice. They might be able to give you a very good perspective on flea-scratching and butt-sniffing, but it isn't very useful for a human being.