Excellent!

Some people might say that it's unkind or out of line to mock conservative women, as I often do. Fortunately, one of them said it's perfectly okay, and joking about "those stupid women!" is even worth defending.

Is it Still Legal to Make a Joke Like That? [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

My plane is late. Man next to me says: "It must be a woman pilot. Women
are always late. She must be doing her nails."

Thanks, K-Lo. It's nice to get the Vatican Medal of Approval, With Virgin Clusters and Fig Leaf.

Nice Soul You Got There; Be a Shame To Lose It

From one of K-Lo's inept, leading interviews, this time with Fr. Thomas D. Williams:

God expects more of us than we think we are capable of. He demands selfless, faithful love. He demands that we pardon our enemies and those who have hurt us. He demands that we give from our want, and not only from our surplus. Why does he ask such difficult, such “unrealistic” things? Because he is calling us to greatness. He is calling us to realize our potential and to grow in resemblance to Jesus. Is this unrealistic? If we were left to our own devices, yes. With the assistance of his grace, no.
...

Part of God’s greatness, according to Christian theology, is his willingness to allow people to act without coercion. He assists us, but our lives and our world are truly in our hands. He made us free and respects our freedom. This means that things will go wrong.

Christian religious institutions have a problem: They feel the need to explain why bad things happen when God is supposedly good and loves us, cares for us, and is omniscient. Their response is Free Will; God is good but people are bad, so bad things happen but it's not God's fault. But they also say that God demands we follow his example (Jesus) and obey his laws at all times or we'll go to hell. So God demands we follow his laws which are so rigorous we can't follow them without his help, but he also gives us utter freedom.

You have to tie yourself up in knots to live with the contradiction. You also have to tell yourself that you are inherently sinful and bound for hell unless you hand your life over completely to God. Yet the Church also tells you to live in this life, marry and have children, get a job and tithe. The illogic of it all causes needless anxiety in people. I've seen people weep with distress that they aren't doing enough to worship God, despite their blameless lives. It's cruel.

Megan on Health Care

Megan discusses health care, which means Megan fantasizes about ways to punish the poor for their inherent inferiority.

Imagine if, rather than giving people food stamps, Section 8 vouchers,
welfare payments, public schooling, and so forth, we simply had an incomes
program to boost the wages of those whose productivity is not up to providing
them a basic, decent standard of living?

Is she actually suggesting that the public subsidize businesses?

But that's not all it would do; it would put choice back in the hands of
the consumers. Do poor people want more car and less house? Great;
why not give them that choice if it doesn't cost us anything? They could
even (whisper it) save the money and do something really important with it at a
future date.

Says the woman who just took on a bunch of debt for consumer purchases.

[...Y]ou'll probably end up giving the wastrels less money if they do
fritter it away. Because once you've actually provided people a minimum
income that is adequate to take care of their basic needs, there's no moral
reason not to turn away those who decline insurance from the emergency
rooms. Giving people more choices also means allowing them to live with
the consequences of those choices.

McArdle offers this as an incentive. Imagine the feeling of moral righteousness you can enjoy as you turn away sick people.

No matter what we do to our health care system, it will never much resemble the
cool modernistic dreams of socialist realist fiction, where everything is
effortlessly resolved by smugly serene Agents of the People.

Megan likes to remind her readers that she was taught politeness and she is very civil, unlike other people . If you say the right thing it's the same thing as doing the right thing. (Just ignore the actual digs and insults.)

We are a phenomenally rich nation--the richest in the history of the planet (in
our weight class, anyway). We can afford to paper over the holes with
money.

She's a libertarian, remember.

California and New York are undergoing financial emergencies. The federal government is of course deeply in debt. It will be easy to convince the public that they should be able to keep more of their money instead of paying for medical care and retirement funds for others. Like Megan they'll emphasize choice and responsibility and fairness. And people will die.

Oh, Megan!

No, Megan, you're still not a feminist. Just because you found someone who formerly had the same sense of entitlement as yourself doesn't mean you are against the unequal distribution of power between genders. You still think power belongs to the powerful. You put on an apron and took off your shoes and served men food as a joke. That's what you think about power inequality--it's a joke to laugh at. You like the gender power imbalance because you think it gives you special privileges, and you believe in privilege.

Give it up. Nobody is fooled, and nobody really cares. Real feminists won't accept you because they're not stupid and they recognize the truth. Conservatives will hire you as a token woman and libertarian, and as long as you hem and haw and quantify feminism, your pretensions will be seen as the pretensions they are. Your words will, of course, continue to support those in power over those out of power. It's your job, and the only reason an English major with a MBA was hired to analyze the economy in the pages of the Atlantic.

Our Duty to our Country

These are the only people in the country who have the right to call themselves Americans. Via Crooks and Liars:

DES MOINES, Iowa (Reuters) - Four peace activists were arrested on Friday as
they attempted to make a “citizens arrest” of Karl Rove, who was one of
President George W. Bush’s top aides before leaving the administration last
year.
“It should be Karl Rove in that van. War Criminal!” one of a dozen
protestors shouted as the four were put into a police van outside a Des Moines
country club where Rove spoke at a private state Republican party
fundraiser.
Chet Guinn, a retired Methodist Minister, was among those led
away.
“To be silent when major crimes are being committed against all
humanity makes us accomplices,” Gwinn told reporters just before his prearranged
arrest, which took place when protestors stepped past a gate.

He's right.

Empathy and Evil

As I've said before, a major difference between conservatives and liberals is empathy. If you can imagine how other people feel, you can put yourself in their shoes. You can begin to try to understand them, and no matter how different they are or how much you disagree with them you can't hate them completely. You empathise, and empathy makes you brave enough to fight your fear of the Other and strong enough to conquer hate. Most conservatives can't begin to understand this. They think the lack of hate is moral confusion and that fear is vigilance. To be brave is an affront, and to understand is to be weak.

This lack of empathy is dangerous. If you don't think about the consequences of your actions and how they affect other people, there is nothing keeping you from doing whatever you want. You will quite deliberately choose to take actions that will harm other people. You manipulate energy markets or sign torture memos or order the bombing of ancient nations because you don't really care what happens to the people affected by your actions. Sometimes you are able to feel some empathy when something bad happens to a person you know, such as when a friend is shot. Then you can feel the shock of his family and friends and sympathy for his pain. But in general you don't care about anyone outside your own circle, be it as small as a family or as large as a nation.

And so choices are made, and ripples of reaction fan out across the surface of the world. And the result is evil. Evil actions that rip people apart, starve children, kill nations. But that's not what the soulless ones, the ones without empathy, say. Bad things aren't consequences of callous decisions. They're the will of God, they're Satan battling God and using man as a battlefield. There is an evil miasma stalking the land, ensnaring good people into doing bad things. Or they have inferior genes. Their culture is bad and their genes are bad so bad things happen to them. It's all their fault.

We get empathy from our parents; many of us are taught that other people have feelings too, that if you hit someone else it hurts them, just like being hit hurts you. If a child is shown understanding and respect he will like and accept himself, and will be much more likely to show understanding and respect--and empathy--for others.

It's our choices that matter. What we do every minute of our lives, how we treat the people around us, and how we look at the people beyond. Who we will treat as brothers, and whom we will choose to fear. Callous people make up excuses and reasons and even ideologies to explain why the don't care about others but the reason is always very simple: They can't.

Read Evil as the Absence of Empathy by Ernest Partridge.

Such Beautiful Creatures

Oh, Kathryn Jean Lopez, you never disappoint. All those years of CCE classes I took were not in vain, for it helped me understand how one person could be so self-deluded. Once you've seen gay men marry and have children just to be accepted by the Catholic Church, Lopez is a piece of cake to understand. For Lopez, God is the Magical Marriage Fairy. Do everything he says, and she'll achieve the impossible: Find someone willing to overlook her stupidity and single-minded devotion to her cause. (But I repeat myself.) It's not her looks; not-beautiful women marry all the time, including not-skinny women. People who have been married a long time know that the surface fades away, and the inner person is the one you actually see. It's the attitude of blind submission, the lack of humor and proportion, the all-encompassing neediness, that drives people away.

Lopez wrote an article on the horrors of in-vitro fertilization, that Frankenstein procedure that lets couples finally have the children they long for. That's supposed to be a good thing, but it's not good enough for Katy Jean, because the only reason for sex is to let God impregnate you--or not, as the case may be.

This position is much maligned, but if you actually think about it, you
don’t have to be Catholic to notice that there is some wisdom in totality, the
idea that there is something very good about giving yourself totally to your
spouse — not putting up barriers and introducing artificial methods and
procedures into your reproductive lives.

Uh huh. I want nothing more than to totally give myself to my spouse, because there's no dividing line between me and him. I have no boundaries; I belong totally to him and not myself. My body is his and God's, not my own. I have no choice when it comes to when I have children, or how many, even if it should cost me my life.

Mind you, this is only for women's reproductive lives. Men can do as they please. Medical procedures are fine if they benefit men and women's non-baby parts. Artificial hearts, shunts, colostomy bags, all other medical procedures are just fine. When Pope John Paul II was shot, God's will wasn't followed; the doctors did everything they could to thwart His Plan--for surely if God let the Pope get shot it was meant to be, right? Just think of the martyrdom! How many lives could have been saved in the future by the Pope's death? Did the doctors think of that? I doubt it.

Kathryn Jean Lopez is in her thirties, and not getting any younger. Her eggs are getting little wrinkles and bad hips as we speak. Hurry up, Katy Jean. As you've said so often, selfish career women often find out they've waited too long, and one day you and your husband might be one of those couples depending on science to make up for God's lack. But I'm sure you'll just accept God's will and go through the rest of your life childless, like you tell everyone else to do.

Ann "O-Ring" Althouse, NYTimes Published writer, speaks!

I haven't read Ann Althouse in months, so it's both shocking and amusing to see what she's up to now. Post after post sneers at Barack Obama's popularity, and no detail is too trivial to create observe. It's an Onion Ringapalooza, all the time. Frankly, I'm surprised she isn't commenting on Obama's man-breasts.

There's a lilting cadence to CNN's pronunciation of the name:
ba-ROCKO-ba-ma, with an arcing, hopeful inflection. It's most noticeable when
they say "John McCain" soon after. The nonObama candidate's name is said in a
leaden singsong, ending in a flat low note.

Next up: Althouse reports the weather is biased for Obama, as it has not rained on his parade.

It's like visiting an uncle you haven't seen for decades, and finding him wearing a tinfoil hat and listening to Alpha Centauri through his cavity fillings.

Ann Althouse Trolls National Enquirer for Information

Ann "Onion Ring" Althouse links to a Mickey Kaus post in the NRO (naturally) that quotes our newspaper of record, the supermarket tabloid National Enquirer. This same periodical also reported Laura Bush moved out of the White House and is divorcing George W., which seems to have escaped Ann's eagle eye. Perhaps she ate out that week instead of buying groceries and missed the news. Perhaps her attention was absorbed by a particularly tasty candy bar in the check-out aisle, or she searched for new blades for her Lady Schick instead. No, she did note a report in the Globe, and said, "It's so freaky!" I guess tabloids are silly when they report on Republicans, and bastions of truth when they report on Democrats.

Despite her protestations to the contrary, it's clear that Althouse is in the tank for McCain. Not that it matters. Times are changing; the shifting of power clearly leans towards the Democrats, and columnists who spent years praising Republicans and slamming Democrats will have to reverse their positions if the want to stay employed.

Larry Kudlow Thrusts His Opinion Forward in the NRO

Larry Kudlow, in the National Review Online, grows excited at new possibilities for drilling deep (for oil). Stocks are "rising," the dollar is "strengthening" and "punishing" that naughty gold. Meanwhile Wall Street is happy about the "big expansion." "President Bush unleashed" the bill to "drill, drill, drill" for oil, "strengthening the dollar, pushing down gold, and driving up share prices."

But there's an impediment to President Bush's muscular plan to save the economy; a woman. She would be "a tough road to hoe" but a "discharge petition" might "blow Pelosi out of the water and open the floodgates to Democratic defections in the House." But the Republicans are still in danger of losing the presidential race, Kudlow says. So they should "drill, drill, drill," which "would have the potency of the Reagan tax cuts 28 years ago in the 1980 landslide race."

We're Doomed.

Via Think Progress:

President George H.W. Bush’s former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft warned the current president to stop threatening Iran. He said yesterday “that by mentioning that threat, ‘we legitimize the use of force…and may tempt the Israelis’ to carry out such a mission. He said he thinks that negotiations must continue.”

This worries me more than anything else I've read. The temptation to stick it to his father is so strong that Bush might just bomb Iran to spite him. And I'm only partially joking.

Words To Live By

Someone on the internet is wise:

If you don't eat meat, go buy some. This way you'll never be tempted to unnecessarily mention[....]
If you don't eat meat and are able to refrain from relating this fact, then, uh, carry on.

TO CLARIFY: You don't have to eat it, of course. That's your call. But by eating meat, most attempts to proudly explain your aversion to the food will become so bogged down in qualifiers that they'll never escape your lips. This will be well worth the $19 investment.

Remember, these days, when you say "I don't eat meat", you're not just misleading people into believing that you spend all of your spare time growing organic vegetables; you're also signalling that you don't have a barbeque grill. This is a major social liability, especailly in Texas.

Flashback Megan: Megan Cooks

I don't often curse here, but you have to be fucking kidding me. From the blog of Rick Bruner.

30th Aug 2004

Jello Salad
Last night, I was invited to a delightful
dinner party at Megan McArdle’s house in the esteemed company of political
bloggers including Tim Blair, Mickey Kaus (albeit fleetingly), Matt Welch, Roger
Simon, Julian Sanchez, Andrew Hofer, Walter Olson, Amy Langfield and others
whose names I missed or forgot....

The theme of the party was Republicanism, given the convention for which several of the bloggers were in town. In keeping with the theme, Megan (who bills herself as a “libertarian,” which as someone at the party noted is what Republicans call themselves when they’re embarrassed to admit they’re Republicans) did all the cooking and waited on the mostly male assemblage hand and foot — barefoot, at that — and clad in a ’50s-housewife-style blouse and skirt and lace apron, the table decorated with two lilac blooms and a small American flag, and so on. The meal, along the same lines, consisted of glazed chicken, homemade dinner rolls, potato salad,
homemade peach pies and, the pièce de résistance, jello salad.

Beautifully prepared and presented and absolutely delicious, it was all
meant to be ironic and Republican. But the joke was on Megan: the food took me
vividly back to my youth, as it was exactly like what I grew up with my
Minnesota-born mother cooking, who is slightly to the left of Michael Moore.

I'll bet she lapped up every minute of the attention. What a servile thing to do, even as a joke. What an embarrassment this woman is.

Flashback Megan

Megan berates a student who emailed her for help. Megan, who is psychic, has determined that the brat just wants someone to do her homework for her.

Bleg
08 Feb 2008 09:01 am
I'm looking for a particular study--one in which students were given a piece of (false) negative information about a teacher, and then told this had been a mistake, that the bad information was about someone else. Nonetheless, when the students who had gotten the bad information were asked to evaluate the teacher, they systematically ranked him/her lower than the students who had never heard it--even though they now knew this to be false. Can anyone help? I had the study, but I can't find it, nor remember the name.

Woops, I'm sorry. That's Megan asking someone to do her homework for her. Here's the other post.

Amusing moment of the day
11 Feb 2008 01:22 pm
I got an email from a student today asking me to do her homework. This is not exactly unusual--the more thoughtful ones provide word counts that I am supposed to hit--but usually they try to be a little more subtle, asking me to "summarize" or "clarify". With the typical conviction of the teenager that adults are total morons who were never young, they expect that I will not recognize the poorly disguised voice of a blurrily photocopied handout peeping out of their request. This one bypassed
such subterfuge and threw herself on my mercy. Having already passed ninth grade, in however desultory a fashion, I find myself unwilling to take on the repeat burden of someone else's homework. I kind of admire the chutzpah of the thing, to be sure, but I am afraid America's students will have to struggle on without my help.

Megan, who frequently berates others for being impolite, cuts a kid to ribbons in the pages of the Atlantic. Imagine how humiliated the girl felt. A simple rejection and enjoiner to do one's own work in a private email would have been enough, but Megan enjoys sneering at others.

A Preamble for Our Time

We the Customers of the United States, in Order to form a more
perfect Business Model, establish Order, insure domestic Obedience, provide for
the corporate defence promote the corporate Welfare, and secure the
Blessings of Safety to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish
this Constitution for the United States of America.

Some Like it "Hot"!

As a person who cooks very often, I felt it behooved me to remind all the little people who might want to emulate my example that they will need a stove for cooking. You need a stove with "on" and "off" buttons, and also a range of temperatures. My dear friend John Featherington-Stokes uses an Aga, but I wouldn't expect you to be able to afford an English stove. You will have to buy an American one.

Stoves should also have doors and lights. Be sure to get a light that goes on when you open up the stove door. Do the lights stay on when the door closes? I must ask my good friend Arabella, who writes for a gourmet magazine. The knobs should turn so the stove can be hot and not so hot, depending on your recipe. The inside of the stove, called an "oven," will have racks to hold the food you want to cook. The stove probably will also have a clock on it, but I haven't learned how to set mine yet, so you don't need one of those.

Soon I will explain how you need something called a "pot" for the top of the stove.

Woman Nabbed After Bizarre Crime Spree*

A woman was arrested today at the Sweet-N-Cremey ice cream shop in Whispering Pines Mall and charged with assaulting customers and damaging merchandise. Kathryn Jean Lopez, 32, was snatching ice cream cones from the hands of teenagers and shouting about Satan when subdued by police.

"It was, like, totally freaksome," said Amber Johnson, 15, who was at the shop with her mother and sister. "She slapped my ice cream cone out of my hand and yelled that I was a slut and harlot. She said something about temptation and licking, but it was kind of hard to understand with all the shouting. My mom paid five dollars for that cone and she's really pissed."

Witnesses said Ms. Lopez's crime spree started at the mall's QVC, where Lopez hid behind a mall sign and attacked female customers as they left the pharmacy.

"That woman stole my medicine," said Ellie O'Malley, 45. "She jumped out and grabbed my plastic bag out of my hands. Then she tore it apart and stuffed the pills in her pocket. She was shouting, "Think of the babies! Obey the Pope!" over and over. Why would she want my birth control pills? Can't she just get her own? She's not the only one who needs them, you know. I already got four kids and I ain't having any more."

Lopez, according to mall security, then ran down the length of the mall, pulling down mannequins dressed in summer clothing and shouting at customers.

"I respect the Pope but this lady was crazy," said Arturo Calderone, 38, owner of Sun Fun Fashions. "She pulled all the bathing suits off the racks and said I was a purveyor of filth and depravity. There is no filth in the store and our prices are very reasonable. Plus sandals are on sale, in a full range of sizes including extra wide."

Police refused to speculate about Lopez's motivation although they did say she was resting quietly in her cell. "She's still praying but at least the rocking has stopped," said Sgt. Alice Stevens.

*Not really.

Two, Four, Six, Eight, Who Do We Appreciate?

Glenn Greenwald:

To blithely justify unprovoked wars and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, as Tom Friedman did and does, is bad enough. To dismiss matters such as government-sponsored torture and lawless detention camps with nothing more than an acknowledgment in passing that perhaps they deserve a "thumbs-down" is almost as bad. That the same people who do that are then surprised and even offended that the rest of the world finds them repellent and dangerous -- that they actually expect that the world should view them as honorable moral arbiters -- is probably the most revealing aspect of all. The casual embrace of widespread, unparalleled aggression and violence by the Tom Friedmans of the world is exceeded only by their complete inability to see themselves for what they are.

These defenders of war and torture have no idea how much they sicken us. Their ugly, blood-soaked cheerleading for war from the safe confines of their cafes, restaurants and luxury apartments. Their in-you-face truimphantism while our bombs blew apart baby girls and teenage boys, pregnant moms and innocent dads. The threats; traitors, Bush Deranged, kill the liberals. The servile excuses for torture, kidnapping, signing statements, Fallujah, the Patriot Act. They turn our stomach and make us sick to death of their callousness and vain-glorious hunger for death and more death. Suck On This, Faster, Please, Kill Them All and Let God Sort Them Out. Mottoes to live by in this wretched time.

You war-lovers and power-seekers, brown-nosers and enablers: You make us sick. We're not pretending. We're not acting indignant because we love to feel aggrieved. That's your job. You disgust us and we will never, ever let you forget it as long as you live.

Megan tries to be clever, with predictable results.

I thought I was done for the day and they drag me back in.

Megan McArdle responds to August J. Pollak's cartoon about her callousness regarding refugees.

Who says the left has no sense of humor? I mean, who aside from August J. Pollak, that is?

First, that doesn't make sense. If she's trying to say that Pollack doesn't have a sense of humor, she's not really making the point. She's implying Pollack said the left have no sense of humor, which doesn't fit the context. Second, she's spreading the cartoon by making note of it. Once again, her ego won't let sleeping dogs lie. Finally, this is very poor snark. No bite, no snap. Just Megan "tee-hee"ing yet again at her lack of compassion and self-awareness. She should be ashamed, but shame is for the little people, evidently.

Karl Rove Sighted Under Florence Nightingale's Skirts

Karl Rove, who went on vacation just in time to skip congressional appearances, has been found in the Crimea.

Run, Karl, run. May the ghostly screams of your victims follow you wherever you go.