Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Policing the Image

There is thin-skinned, and then there is Megan McArdle. After showing the world she didn't understand what was going on (more on that later), she later got a little testy on twitter. 









Richard Yeselson @yeselson 3 hours ago
  1. It's perversely ahistorical for to opine re: Brown/Wilson/Ferguson w/out any allusion to race at all/

    1. Do you think that that angle has been under covered?

    1. That's exactly what so profoundly misconstrued here. It's not "my angle" to discuss race--to not even use racial descriptors

    1. like "black" and "white" to describe Brown/Wilson. It's "America's angle"! It the great weight of our history. How could you
    1. not even acknowledge--if only to downplay it if that is your view? Just deeply, antiseptically odd. No way around it.
    1. I’m not downplaying anything. But in what way would a lengthy discussion of it have altered the piece?
    1. I'm not talking about a "lengthy discussion". I'm talking about the occlusion of lacking even a mention of that context. If
    1. Would I be telling a single reader anything they didn’t know?

    1. It reads like what, clearly, you intend it to be: a deliberate omission of obvious context that a second reader would have
    1. surely suggested you include. Some things you include not to convince, but because, if you don't include them, you reveal
    1. paradoxically, your own moral and historical blindness.
    1. Because if I weren’t so historically blind, I would definitely support indicting someone who couldn’t be convicted?
    1. Wow, you're just arguing for the sake of arguing now. Your position on the indictment doesn't absolve you one way or the
    1. You turned that into “historical blindness”, as if maybe I thought the huge racial disparities in the justice system were minor.
    1. How would I know? I didn't read your last Ferguson column. I'm coming to this column cold. How else to know what you think
    1. is important here, except by the words you wrote between the four corners of the page. Or didn't write.
    1. Or we can think “Hmmm, why might a reasonable person have done this?"
    1. Why do you assume that an occasional reader--and surely there are many who read you less often than I do--should give you
    1. Because as you well know from being on the web, it is impossible to defend against every horrible interpretation people can invent
    1. Right, yes indeed. So I didn't call you a "racist" or anything close to that--which would indeed be an outrageous and

    1. You’re using words with highly charged implications, then trying to retreat to something blandly defensible when challenged.

    1. Not at all! "Perversely ahistorical" is what I said, and I stand by that. Not racist or anything like that. You don't like
    1. Or are you just saying that I have to explicitly write that it’s about race in order to prove that I am not a racist?

    1. Why are you using the word racist?! I didn't, nor would I. No, I'm writing that a failure to use just a few words of context
    1. revealed that you were historically dense or peculiarly insensitive to the weight of history. Just a few words! That             
    2.                

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    She operates at an intellectual level so naturally she's at a terrible disadvantage.

    5 comments:

    Downpuppy said...

    Do you suppose Megan misses the Atlantic, when her comment section was at least partially inhabited by civilized humans?

    Susan of Texas said...

    I'll bet she misses the prestige and the upper hand it used to give her.

    ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

    She's incredibly lucky anyone pays her to be an entitled, clueless clown.
    ~

    Susan of Texas said...

    Yeah, an entitled, clueless clown would never realize that.

    Roger said...

    Little testy -- Isn't that Meeegan's pet name for Suderman?