Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking

Wednesday, June 1, 2016

What Goes Around, Comes Around

I am (still) occupied with the Gawker post so here are a few Megan McArdle critiques to keep you entertained.

First, a letter to the Chicago Tribune, where McArdle is syndicated. The writer was piqued by McArdle's mocking of occupational licensing.

Next, a response from Damon Linker to McArdle's claim that the Republicans are not at all to blame for Trump's rise. The critique is very polite but damning. Linker:

From Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America through the spread of talk radio and Fox News to the rise of Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, and Donald Trump, the story of the Republican Party since the early 1990s is an abject lesson in the dangers of stoking populist anger and resentment — and the difficulty in controlling it once it is unleashed.

 McArdle and P. Suderman, boy anger-stoker, are knee deep in the Tea Party welfare circuit. McArdle praised Sarah Palin extravagantly, a point that was passed around the internet like a slam book after McArdle's post came out.

Perhaps these factors were all pressing on her mind when she poured out a fountain of blather in support of global warming denial. Linker also mentioned climate change and creationism as reasons to not take Republicans seriously.

McArdle:

The arguments about global warming too often sound more like theology than science. Oh, the word “science” gets thrown around a great deal, but it's cited as a sacred authority, not a fallible process that staggers only awkwardly and unevenly toward the truth, with frequent lurches in the wrong direction. I cannot count the number of times someone has told me that they believe in “the science,” as if that were the name of some omniscient god who had delivered us final answers written in stone. For those people, there can be only two categories in the debate: believers and unbelievers. Apostles and heretics.
As Mary McCarthy famously said, 'Every word she writes is a lie, including "and" and "the."'

McArdle also wrote another post on the inevitable downfall of Obamacare, which seems to be her blogging equivalent of stroking her blankie to self-soothe.

Finally, Kevin Drum responded to the Trump post as well, telling McArdle that her reasons for absolving Republicans to blame are mostly wrong or marginal. Like Linker, Drum explains how the Republicans created their own downfall.

Her familiar world is shifting beneath the feet of our princess. McArdle based her self-image on the belief that she is an elite success in a meritocracy. If her high-born place in the hierarchy is destroyed she has nothing.


6 comments:

Ellis Weiner said...

"The arguments about global warming too often sound more like theology than science. Oh, the word “science” gets thrown around a great deal, but it's cited as a sacred authority, not a fallible process that staggers only awkwardly and unevenly toward the truth, with frequent lurches in the wrong direction."

Classic McMegan: 20% disingenuous, 80% untrue. I invite her to cite a single instance in which discussions of global warming cite "science" as "sacred." This is a dumb-bell, pseudo-"clever" argument along the lines of "Oh yeah? Well, science is a religion, too!"

Kathy said...

Distressing to discover that you're not a princess, but the servant who hands the Princess her toilet paper, or rather, wipes the Princess' bum.

Susan of Texas said...

This is getting good, I mean this is getting very unfortunate for McArdle. Michael Mann saw her post and snorted out a tweet. Then somebody who probably knows something about climate change and who definitely knows how to deal with dishonest arguments got into it with McArdle on Twitter.

And now I see that McArdle's Trump post was discussed on Majority Report.

Bless her heart.

fledermaus said...

Jebus, that essay couldn't have been more stupid even if she had started with "Webster's dictionary defines 'science' as . . . "

Julia Grey said...

I wonder sometimes if she feels anxiety over the way she is being piled on these days. She used to be so fêted, so admired in her Jane Galt days, and now....

Susan of Texas said...

Julia Grey, she receives a lot of praise in her own circles and her success is, in her eyes, proof of her own value. It is easy for her to ignore criticism as long as she doesn't do anything too obviously corrupt or stupid. Unfortunately she can't stop defending her ideology, which makes her look so bad.

She was warned a million times that she was getting out of control and she didn't care. In her eyes, the climate denial people are just a bunch of haters. http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-02/a-sad-fact-from-today-s-bag-of-hate-mail

She is very much out of her depth. She thinks it's all a game while everyone else is trying to deal with harsh reality.