Ignorance Is Bliss (II)

Have you ever wanted to see what it takes to get Megan McArdle excited? Evidently it's quite easy: just criticize billionaires who support her husband! Let's watch Maisie McLazy go apeshit over the Koch brothers and all their lovely money, as she pours out a torrent of twittering support. (Start at the bottom and work your way up.)

.@empeos The fact that evidence is hard to obtain does not give us license to assert unproved claims as fact
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@empeos Again, HOW changed discussion? Support for AGW went up during period of greatest funding, then plummeted when Obama was elected.
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@empeos Either way, why drag the Kochs into it?
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@empeos I'd put more money on "People don't want to use less energy, & freaked out when it became clear that's what cap-and-trade meant"
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@empeos You have retreated from that to saying the Kochs fostered some slight but consequential shift in public opinion, still w/o data.
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@empeos Back to the original point: it is ridiculous to claim that but for the Kochs, cap and trade would have passed.
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@empeos The Kochs are becoming the witches of the left: they explain all bad things that would otherwise be scary and incomprehensible.
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@empeos Again, what data? I am skeptical that think tanks can stage these "consequential" shifts in public opinion.
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@empeos You have asserted that they were important. I have seen no good evidence of that claim.
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@empeos Believe me, I would love to think that public opinion is mostly shaped by wonks & white papers. Evidence does not support this.
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@empeos $48 mm over 11 years isn't enough to fund a bad sitcom, much less an all-out makeover of American beliefs.
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@empeos This myopia is natural for Greenpeace, but it's basically rather silly. Time frame is also rather long. (1/2)
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@empeos It's as if they claimed that George Soros donated hundreds of millions to fund action on financial legislation.
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@empeos the Greenpeace report treats all donations to conservative groups as if they were directly spent on opposing climate science.
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@empeos Why, that the Kochs have injected significant doubt into public opinion. Presumably you have some data that support this assertion?
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@empeos Really? You keep saying that, but where's your proof? Give me correlation, even.
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@empeos Also worth noting that the Kochs fund AGW believers like Ron Bailey
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@empeos I don't think there's any reasonable way the Kochs produced a 30 point drop in AGW belief.
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@empeos You're the one defending. I support c&t, but I don't think the Kochs killed it; I think it's hard to raise energy prices.
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@empeos Do you think Manchin has a problem because Kochs are running ads, or b/c c&t would devastate WV economy?
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@empeos For correlation--not even causation--need measured change in Koch funds/effectiveness that matches timing, not "existence of Kochs"
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@empeos Was huge shift in public opinion on Iraq because Soros spent a whole bunch of money, or b/c the downside became more apparent?
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@empeos More parsimonious that people were happy to support "doing something for environment" when "something" was both vague and unlikely
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@empeos I'm also puzzled by the seismic shift in public opinion, but there's no plausible Koch induced mechansim (2/3)
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@empeos What massive surge in anti-climate change propaganda? Public opinion did not shift b/c of a tidal wave of Cato white papers. (1/2)
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@empeos If you think there was a Koch-supressed groundswell of support for increasing price of gasoline/electricity, get out more.
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RT @reihansalam: Incredible. Just read a serious person write that voters wouldn't have opposed cap-and-trade if not for the Kochs. Amazing.
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Wow, that's some serious love for the oil and gas industry mavens! Naturally McArdle utterly ignores their tea-party organization and support, making it all about cap and trade and a few Cato white papers. But what else can she say when they support P. Suderman, boy husband, and all her bestest buds? (And let's not forget that she might need some of that wingnut welfare herself, the way she keeps screwing up in The Atlantic.)

But please don't think that McArdle tongue-bathes the Kochs just because they give her money, via her husband. McArdle met David Koch at a cocktail party and he seems very nice to her, so naturally he wouldn't try to screw over his fellow Americans for money. To read more go here, where you can see McArdle explain in great detail how the Kochs couldn't possibly be behind the tea parties, something that was just coming out at the time and has been amply proven since then. McArdle, of course, is far too much of an ideological hack to either find out the truth or care about the truth, but it sure does make her look very stupid (again!) to be so very, very wrong (again!).

But hey, nobody ever said that being educated means you're intelligent. It just means you know what to do to get people to give you Ivy League degrees for little work and no intellectual growth.

It wouldn't be quite so bad being ruled over by a money-hungry, deeply crooked elite if they didn't shove their lack of intelligence in our faces constantly. It's just adding insult to injury.