The Opening Of Hostilities

When people like Rod Dreher are allowed to continue their vicious anti-gay campaigns, gay people suffer. When anti-gay bigotry is ignored or permitted, children grow up to hate or be repulsed by the idea of gay children and adults. Those children make life miserable for other children who are obviously gay and continue persecution as adults. I have seen young children taunt and mistreat gay classmates and the effect on the gay kids will break your heart.

Bigotry is bad enough but it is especially galling when the persecutor is working out his personal issues through political means. There are many rumors on the internet that Rod is bisexual. Rumors on the internet are not facts but those rumors must be kept in mind when reading Rod's work. Even if those rumors are false, Rod would still be working out personal issues regarding sexuality because of his father. Rod's father, going by what Rod has said, thought Rod was a sissy-boy and treated him with abusive disdain. His dad withheld approval because Rod was not what he wanted in a son. Rod's physical weakness, disdain for work and the manly art of killing, and love of books did not flatter him and make him look manly in the community. That is perfectly clear from Rod's writing. Rod went through years of depression, he said, after realizing that he would never have his father's approval.

Now his father is dead and Rod will never be able to get that approval. Rod thinks he has come to peace with his father before the latter's death. He wrote about the beauty of his father's decline and death, how it brought his whole family together, and how he was able to feel closer to his father. Rod is utterly delusional and this inner peace will not last. It cannot. Nothing has changed. His father never accepted him. Rod never acknowledged the abusive nature of his parents; his father's disgust and his mother's compliance. When the afterglow of family togetherness fades, Rod will still feel rejected and inadequate and will still yearn for his father's approval. And now there is no hope of ever getting it and the emotional collapse will be as spectacular as it will be inevitable.

I have reserved Rod's two books from the library and we will be taking a closer look at Rod's sexuality and family dynamics via his own writings.

It may seem distasteful to discuss one man's sexuality in public. Rod pretends to want to retreat to an enclave of self-fulfillment but his career is both public and political.  Thanks to Rod Dreher we know that people's sexuality is not a private matter but a political matter that must be whipped up until every gay little girl or boy feels just as humiliated and rejected as Rod Douthat Dreher.

A Question of Failure

It must be horrible to be conservative. Megan McArdle:

"Why can't a woman be more like a man?" asks Henry Higgins in "My Fair Lady." Women might point out that, since too many men seem to trust a mysterious toilet paper fairy to change out the forlorn tube of cardboard, it makes more sense to ask: "Why can't a man be more like a woman?"
But regardless of how we ask it, the question is a good one: Why can't members of the sexes be more alike? Why do so many irritating differences persist? Feminists' answer has been: cultural and structural sexism. Societies train women to take second fiddle to men in work and relationships -- and then punish them for trying to break out of their assigned roles. No, say traditional conservatives: Women and men are different, and cultures reflect those differences.

Traditional conservatives also say that black people are inferior to white people. That women are inferior to men. That non-Christians are violent and Christians are peaceful. Conservatives say a lot of stupid things based on their neediness and fearfulness, which is a direct result of the abusive nature of conservative child rearing.

The conservatives may now be getting some support from a surprising source: transgender men.
It's not news that women's and men's brains aren't exactly the same. But why they aren't the same is a matter of some dispute. We know that training can actually change the physical structure of your brain. London cab drivers famously have more gray matter in the area associated with spatial recognition, perhaps developed through their work navigating the metropolis. In the same way, women's brains might be different from men's because they have been trained to be different, in ways that show up in the distribution of their brain cells over time.

There are differences between male and female biology. Some might be an advantage, some a disadvantage, but biology is not destiny and one certainly cannot conclude that men are smarter than women from the evidence McArdle links to. She leaps to connect intelligence and success to brain differences because she is a conservative but if she had read the study she might have thought--well, we will never know, will we?

Conservatives can take a fact and completely misinterpret it due to their need to conform to conservative beliefs. If women's brains have to be trained to become different they are not different. If they are different it does not necessarily follow that one is better than the other or that any difference makes a substantial difference in intelligence. Authoritarian, hierarchal societies require the separation of people into superiority and inferiority so they may maintain their position of power over others.

A small but very interesting study was recently done on transitioning female-to-male transgender subjects, who receive high doses of testosterone. After just four weeks, images of their brains recorded significant changes.

Obviously, I do not want to overinterpret the results of one study with a small number of subjects. But since I'm sure we'll see more studies like this in the future, with a range of results, I think it's worth asking some uncomfortable questions this raises: What if some of the disparity between men and women -- for instance, in the workforce -- never goes away? What if the gaps are, at some level, indelible because men's brains are simply better wired for success in that environment?

Ahhhhhh. Suddenly WTF? becomes perfectly clear.

McArdle failed at her chosen field. She flamed out. She waved bye-bye to money and power and a potential hedge fund manager spouse, apartment in Manhattan, beach "cottage" at Martha's Vineyard, and vacation maison in Paris. That elite, exclusive life that she wanted so dearly and never achieved and can only envy from afar. No amount of Thermomixes or luxury taxis on call at the push of an app will ever compensate for a husband who graduated from the University of North Florida or the knowledge that the only thing keeping her from humiliating anonymity is the largess of Koch-created wingnut welfare distributors.

This study doesn't prove anything like this. Such a small study doesn't prove anything. And when we have enough data to draw big conclusions, we might conclude that the differences that actually exist don't matter for career success. Or that women have the biological advantage. On the other hand, the scientific process might prove the traditional conservatives were right. Ish.

Since the scientific process never proves conservatives are right that is highly doubtful. After all, science proved that conservatives are low-information authoritarians and McAdle rejects that idea out of hand. Which is why McArdle also has cautioned us not to trust scientific studies, a fact that she must acknowledged here because some unkind and all-too-present people will be certain to point it out. Repeatedly.

When evaluating scientific findings, I always remind myself: "The universe is not here to please you" and "nature doesn't care about fair." It can be true that women are less likely to have astounding math or engineering abilities, even though that's unfair as heck, and I don't like it. In the world of science, things do not become more true just because we'd be better off if they were.

This is why it is horrible to be a conservative. Anything that interferes with conservative shibboliths must be ignored. McArdle probably has never heard of Ada Lovelace, Rosalind Franklin, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Marie-Sophie Germain, Amalie Emmy Noether, Dame Mary Lucy Cartwright, Esther Lederberg, Chien-Shiung Wu, Lise Meitner, Julia Hall Bowman Robinson, Nettie Stevens,  Shafi Goldwasser. And these problems are not in the distant past.

Don't forget that McArdle also thinks it quite possible that Black people are genetically inferior to White people. Not that she says they are--dear me, no. Just that they might be stupider and Charles Murray might be right. Who knows?

And when it comes to gender, it's clear that nature is completely uninterested in fairness. All nature cares about is that you a) survive and b) reproduce.  Justice is a human value, not a natural condition. Male orb spiders are more likely than not to end their romantic interlude as dinner for their mate. This is rather harder on the spiders than anything most female humans have to endure, but it seems to make for healthier kids, so the males have to take one for the team. What if nature, with its infinite disregard for our wishes, simply declined to deliver the raw talent for women to ever gain equal representation at the top of many fields?

That would be balm to a wounded soul, wouldn't it? It's not that McArdle isn't terribly bright despite her extremely expensive education. It's not that she couldn't make it in the world she wanted to swan around in. She didn't fail to measure up. It's just that she's female and women might--not that she's saying it's so but just might-not be able to become rich and powerful and be interviewed on CNBC instead of having to be a tiny face in a tiny box with only 30 seconds of time on the Larry Kudlow show.

But even though McArdle wasn't to blame for her personal failures it doesn't mean that she is not super smart and rilly elite.

Well, it seems worth pointing out the things this wouldn't prove:

1. It wouldn't prove that women belong back in the kitchen. Women are already in the workforce in large numbers, doing all kinds of jobs. Obviously, women can do those jobs. So we know that the old way of doing things was, in fact, holding a lot of women back from doing things they'd be good at.
2. It wouldn't prove that sexism is no longer an issue. Male and female brains can be systematically different, and women can still be unfairly discriminated against in the workforce. One thesis does not disprove the other.
3. It wouldn't prove that we can stand pat even if we've realized that we've reached a place where female and male brain differences are accounting for most of the difference in workplace outcome. If male brains do a better job at certain things -- say, competition or negotiating -- then the answer might be "we need to restructure the economy so that it better rewards female talents." Science can tell you what is. It cannot tell you what ought to be. And after all, gents, we are the majority. Fair is fair.
4. It wouldn't prove that any individual woman is unsuited for a job. Averages are just averages. There are women who are great at math, and men who are great at nursing, just to name two historically gendered activities. Even if group averages are different, you can't infer anything about individual ability by looking at their group memberships.

What this would do is greatly complicate the attempt to infer sexism by looking at differences in outcomes. Unfortunately, outcomes are the best data we have. It's pretty easy to count how many women are in the C-suite. It's nearly impossible to monitor the thousands of daily internal decisions that add up to a discriminatory barrier, or don't.

Since everything is just too, too hard we will have to go by the sexist standards. It's only fair.

So if we find out that women's brains really are different from men's, in ways that are driven not by the environment in which they are raised but the hormones suffusing their brain, we're going to need to start by rethinking the ways that we identify sexism in the first place -- and then start thinking about what sort of remedies might be appropriate. This is going to be an even longer, messier negotiation than the one we're having now.

Especially if science tells us that women are just better at understanding complicated stuff like science. Men, the benighted darlings, will just have to trust us.

Hee hee! Isn't the idea of women being smarter than men funny! Like a monkey appearing to read a book!

And isn't it sad that we must divide the sexes into inferior and superior. But what else can we do when sexism is too hard to figure out?

Off Of The Top Of My Head---

You could grow old and die waiting for Megan McArdle to plink out a post. She has finally decided to do her job, ironically about someone who she notes refused to do her job, with a post that must have taken all of 15 minutes to create.

A Kentucky clerk has been ordered to jail for refusing to issue licenses for gay marriages. This seems like a tad bit of an overreaction. Unfortunately, it's what we've come to in the culture wars.

Tell that to the Republican judge who knew that she'd just sob and whine until conservatives paid her fines for her.

I'll start by stating my priors: I believe in very strong protections for freedom of conscience, religious and otherwise.

She's a libertarian who believes that the government should protect your feelings instead of letting the free market do the punishing for her.

That means I believe that Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis has a perfect right to oppose gay marriage, and indeed, to refuse to issue those marriage licenses. But she does not have a right to refuse to issue those licenses while still remaining county clerk.

McArdle goes on to say that you should be able to do what you want but you should not expect to keep a job you refuse to perform at the same time.

The judge made absolutely the right choice, much as I rue the necessity. Rule of law is one of the most important things between us and barbarianism. No, it is never perfect, but it is better than the alternative. It has to be preserved no matter which side is the target. Conservatives who applauded the Hobby Lobby decision and now applaud Kim Davis should take a long, hard think about how they'd feel if President Obama took a bold stand for freedom of conscience by slapping Hobby Lobby with fines in open defiance of the Supreme Court. If you think that only the other side has to obey laws they don't like, then you are not in favor of the rule of law. You are in favor of law as a crude tool for the raw exercise of power -- and when you are in a minority, as the opponents of gay marriage are, then you should carefully consider where this is likely to end up.

Unfortunately, the sheer volume of the culture war makes it hard to ask those questions. It's much easier to ask "my team or yours"? And where that ends up is absurd results like a county clerk going to jail, instead of quietly going to work somewhere more suited to her religious principles.

It's scarcely absurd for someone to go to jail for contempt of court but whatever. Rule of law, bitchez!

Many of her readers do not appreciate her even-handedness. Freedom of association! Pizza parlors and cake bakers! Obummercare!  Sanctuary cities! Legal weed! Will the jackboot never stop stomping??

Get Out While Your Brains Still Work: A McArdle Shorter

Shorter Megan McArdle: The free hand of the marketplace has eliminated scarcity and communism arose because idealistic Russians wanted to make production more efficient.

Please tell me I misinterpreted that post. Otherwise McArdle spent $100,00 and McArdle's parents spent about $125,000 on her education for nothing. Talk about a misallocation of resources.

How To Make Pie Crust

Let's make a pie crust. Please forgive the bad lighting and focus; the lighting is poor in my kitchen and this is my first attempt to upload phone photos.

 

 

 

First I stirred the flour with a fork to loosen it up. I measured out two level cups and whisked in one teaspoon salt.

I cut in 2/3 cup of Crisco. I used the same pastry cutter that I've been using for my entire adult life. They cost about $10 and last forever. Mine is missing one tine but works just fine. I timed it and it takes one minute and ten seconds to cut in the fat until it is the size of crumbs.

Next you add about 4-8 tablespoons of ice water and stir.  I've found it's better to add a little too much than not enough. The flour will absorb the water. Since I was photographing the crust I erred on the side of caution and added only 1/4 cup which is what the recipe called for. It wasn't quite enough and the crust was a little too crumbly but it still worked out okay. I stirred just until combined and quickly form the dough into a ball with my hands and flattened it slightly to make it cool faster.

 

 

 

I wrapped the crust in plastic wrap and let it rest in the refrigerator for an hour. You should let it rest for at least half an hour but no longer than overnight. I took the dough out of the refrigerator, cut it in half, and formed it into two balls. I flattened the balls to make them easier to roll and put one back in the refrigerator. Then I was ready to roll out the bottom crust. Notice that there is flour on the board. It will not ruin the crust and it will keep it from sticking.

I dusted the silicone rolling pin and rolled the dough gently up and down for a second or two. I turned the crust and rolled it again. Then I started in the middle and rolled outward all around the dough, enlarging the circle. I added a dusting of flour as necessary; as the circle gets bigger it will get stickier.

Notice that it's not a perfect circle and that there are some breaks. If it tears I wet the crust a little and stick the two parts back together and dust it with flour.  If it sticks to the board I loosen it with a spatula and dust the board with flour. It takes practice to roll out the dough so it is of an even thickness and (rough) circle but once you get the hang of it, it's easy.

I fold over the crust twice and unfold it into the pan or drape the crust over the rolling pin. Whatever works. I then rolled the second crust, put in the filling I had prepared while the dough rested (it was a chicken pot pie) and covered it. Note that there are many imperfections; that's okay. It'll be fine.

 

 

I trimmed off the excess crust but left plenty of crust for the next step. I tucked and rolled the upper crust over the lower crust and then crimped it between fingers and thumbs in a kind of pinching motion I picked up from watching my mother.

 

 

 

Because it is a savory pie I mixed one egg yolk with a teaspoon of water and used a pastry brush to cover the pie with the egg wash.  Pie crust does not brown very much. I then cut three smallish slits in the upper crust to let out steam. If it were a fruit pie I would brush it with milk and sprinkle it with a cinnamon-sugar mix. I baked it until it was bubbling and browned. McArdle is right that you should bake it for about 10 minutes at a higher temperature and then lower it to 350 degrees but my gas oven is about 65 years old and the regulator doesn't work very well so I just baked it at 350 the entire time.

Voila! Chicken pot pie.

It's Not Easy Being Green

After a certain point conservatism becomes a sickness. Jonah Goldberg:

Bear with me for a second. You may have heard that Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy broke up. This news came not long after Miss Piggy came out in favor of abortion rights, causing some — okay, me — to wonder if Kermit is prolife. But that’s a post for another day. A month after the break-up, BuzzFeed is reporting on Kermit’s new girlfriend, Denise[.]

Now, I’m not judging. The heart wants what the heart wants. But isn’t it interesting that in a seemingly limitless universe of potential love-connections, Kermit the frog has fallen for yet another pig? I mean not only are there Muppets for every kind of animal, there are also Muppets for creatures not found in nature. What, exactly, is Gonzo for instance? You’d think that we might hear from some female frogs, complaining that they’re not good enough for the world’s richest and most eligible frog.

"What can I say, I have a thing for pigs," Kermit said in one of the promos for the new Muppet show. But the idea of a relationship between a frog and pig bugged Goldberg enough to post in protest. Frogs should date frogs and female frogs should think that Kermit owes them--something. Purity before love!

Jonah believes in pure blood and is repelled by mixed marriage, even when the blood is cold and the relationship is between two handfuls of felt.

Another Round Of What's Wrong With Everyone Else

Many, many times we have seen Megan McArdle link to a study that either disproves or does not prove her statements. Her "errors" always benefit the rich so there is little doubt of her dishonesty. But this is McArdle, so she must also lecture everyone else about their errors and bias. It's an old story--another rehash--but her latest effort reveals the depth of her own habit of deception: she assumes everyone else is just like her.

 [...J]ournal editors and journalists do not necessarily exercise appropriate caution. That's not because journal editors are dumb and don't get statistics, but because scientific journals are looking for novel and interesting results, not "We did a study and look, we found exactly what you'd have expected before you'd plowed through our four pages of analysis." This "publication bias" means that journals are basically selecting for outliers. In other words, they are in the business of publishing papers that, for no failure of method but simply from sheer dumb luck, happened to get an unusual sample. They are going to select for those papers more than they should -- especially in fields that study humans, who are expensive and reluctant to sit still for your experiment, rather than something like bacteria, which can be studied in numbers ending in lots of zeroes.

Journalists, who unfortunately often don't understand even basic statistics, are even more in this business. They easily fall into the habit (and I'm sure an enterprising reader can come up with at least one example on my part), of treating studies not as a potentially interesting result from a single and usually small group of subjects, but as a True Fact About the World. Many bad articles get written using the words "studies show," in which some speculative finding is blown up into an incontrovertible certainty. This is especially true in the case of psychology, because the results often suggest deliciously dark things about human nature, and not occasionally, about the political enemies of the writers.

...

 Well, as I said in a column about an earlier fiasco concerning research findings on American attitudes about gay marriage, "We reward people not for digging into something interesting and emerging with great questions and fresh uncertainty, but for coming away from their investigation with an outlier -- something really extraordinary and unusual. When we do that, we're selecting for stories that are too frequently, well, incredible." This is true of academics, who get rewarded with plum jobs not for building a well-designed study that offers a messy and hard-to-interpret result, but for generating interesting findings .

Likewise, journalists are not rewarded for writing stories that say "Gee, everything's complicated, it's hard to tell what's true, and I don't really have a clear narrative with heroes and villains." Readers like a neat package with a clear villain and a hero, or at least clear science that can tell them what to do. How do you get that story? That's right, by picking out the outliers. Effectively, academia selects for outliers, and then we select for the outliers among the outliers, and then everyone's surprised that so many "facts" about diet and human psychology turn out to be overstated, or just plain wrong.

She is still pissed that social studies show conservatives are low-information, biased, callous, error-prone authoritarians but doesn't have the nerve to directly attack someone like Bob Altemeyer.

Lizard People

Driftglass reminds us that Jonah Goldberg's reaction to Hurricane Katrina ten years ago was exactly what one would expect from Jonah Goldberg. A refresher:

ATTN: SUPERDOME RESIDENTS I think it's time to face facts. That place is going to be a Mad Max/thunderdome Waterworld/Lord of the Flies horror show within the next few hours. My advice is to prepare yourself now. Hoard weapons, grow gills and learn to communicate with serpents. While you're working on that, find the biggest guy you can and when he's not expecting it beat him senseless. Gather young fighters around you and tell the womenfolk you will feed and protect any female who agrees to participate without question in your plans to repopulate the earth with a race of gilled-supermen. It's never too soon to be prepared.

Goldberg thinks he is funny because he laughs at The Simpsons. So he joked about the death and suffering of people that he obviously did not consider to be "real" people. His rancid racism almost obscures that fact. He joked about it. He watched the disaster on tv, sat down to his computer, and told a (purported) funny.

We know that a defining attribute of libertarianism is a lack of empathy and Jonah is the poster boy-and we do mean boy-for that condition. But Jonah's racism and callousness are not the only things he revealed in that little paragraph.

Jonah is a physical coward.

Even in his power fantasy he could not imagine himself as powerful. "While you're working on that, find the biggest guy you can and when he's not expecting it beat him senseless." Of course Jonah would have to hit someone from behind. He is far too weak and spineless to do anything else. The wonder is that he would acknowledge it but obviously he was quite incapable of doing anything else. Jonah knows that for him to succeed in anything that entailed physical strength he would have to eliminate anyone strong.

Of course he would also need many weapons because Jonah knows that eliminating the biggest man would still leave plenty of people who could take him out, such as big men, strong women, skilled teenagers, and babies with lollypop sticks. Even with the elimination of any competition and a stockpile of weapons, Jonah knows he is so weak and impotent that he could not hold any position of strength on his own. He would need "young fighters" because you can't always expect to be able to sneak up on your enemies. Someone would actually have to fight someone at some time. So Jonah figures that he'll get some better men to do all the fighting for him.

It is no surprise that a racist would also be a coward; the two go hand in hand. We hate what we fear. It is also no surprise that a racist coward would be sexist as well. Someone incapable of putting himself in another's shoes would not be able to see a woman as a real person. Jonah "jokes" that he would tell the "womenfolk" that he would feed and protect them if they have sex with him.

Before I continue a small reminder might be in order.

I hardly need to add more but I will anyway. Jonah must add "who agrees to participate without question in your plans to repopulate the earth" because many questions immediately spring to mind, such as, "Are you shitting me?" Or, "What on earth makes you think I need you (or anyone else) to protect or feed me?" Or maybe, "Don't you realize that I would rather slit my own throat than see you naked?"

Yes, this brainless, balls-less, heartless, repellent person felt perfectly comfortable joking and laughing while non-people died. Since then like Megan McArdle he has failed upward on and onward and will continue to do so while trying to ensure the poor suffer and die.

Humble Pie

A few days ago I noted that most of McArdle's columns are rehashes of old material. Friday's food post was no exception. McArdle has repeatedly told her audience that pie crust is too hard to make--which means that she can't make pie crust. Yet McArdle is also incapable of putting aside her pretense that she is a cooking and food expert. So McArdle tries to tell the little people all about pie without actually knowing how to make a decent pie.

For example, take this post from March:

Saturday is Pi Day -- 3.14.15. It's only going to occur once this century. So, naturally, you're going to want to celebrate by making some delicious, delicious pie. But how? I hear you ask. What if I am no good at making pie crust? I understand your worry. Pie crust is daunting if you've never made it before. And those refrigerator rolls of pie crust usually taste like you're chewing on a sheet of cardboard. But that needn't keep you from enjoying pie on Saturday. There are lots of ways to enjoy pie without giving yourself a crash course in pastry making. Here are five pies you can make without ever picking up a rolling pin.

Admitting ignorance is hard on the ego but is absolutely necessary. You should never imply knowledge when you have none because some smartass will come along and make you look stupid for doing it.

And I am that smartass.

A reader wrote to ask me for my best pie recipes. This is a topic near and dear to my heart. I love pie. In fact, my favorite food in the whole world is purple raspberry pie, a delicacy that unfortunately is not available to most people because purple raspberries do not store well, so the only way to get them is to pick your own.

Always read the study. Or, in this case, google "purple raspberry." One on-line nursery states:

Our perfect purple raspberry! Plant is vigorous, hearty and resistant to insects. Yields large, sweet berries with great flavor. Fruit never fades, even when canned or frozen. Cold-hardy. Late-summer bearing. Ripens in August. Self-pollinating. A licensed variety of Cornell University.

However purple raspberries are difficult to find, making them suitable for an elite foodie such as McArdle. I can't recall seeing them at a grocery store and I spend half of my life at grocery stores.

Although there might be a reason that they are not as common as other raspberries.

A hybrid of the black and red raspberry is known as the purple raspberry, taking on the purple overtone, but having the same texture as the black or red and a mildly sweet flavor. It isn't considered to be as good as the others by many growers.

McArdle drones on:

My official position on pie is that the benighted fools who do not like it have never actually had good pie, which is to say, a pie homemade by someone who knows what they are doing.

That might be true; the author is not a food writer. It is still a silly claim. The "benighted fools" at Slate is one contrarian who thinks pie is a poor way to use berries.

At this point, though, "American"-style pie is something of a relic: Where the civilized world has moved past its awkward bread-casket age to head in more refined directions, pie stands still. Our modern pie of piled fruit stewing in a shell of fragile dough is not an innovation but a replica of something primitive—piled meat entombed in hard crust—nudged in the vague direction of dessert.

McArdle is very familiar with the ways of the contrarian, being one herself. It's a good way to sell an article without having to do a lot of work.

Writer: I have a great idea! I'll write an article about pie, claiming that it's neither easy nor as American as!

Editor: Great idea! It'll be clickbait! And then you can write another article about putting peas in guacamole!

Writer: What? Are you crazy? Peas in guacamole?

Editor: It's gold, Jerry! Gold!

That's because pie is one of the trickiest foodstuffs in the American culinary canon. Good pie is sublime. But good pie basically cannot be had from a commercial establishment.

Tell that to House of Pies, preferably after you have eaten one of their Black Bottom Pies. I too prefer homemade over commercial but McArdle's absolutes are very tiresome.

Making it well is too labor-intensive to be profitable, and its ephemeral crust does not benefit from storage. It is best eaten on the day it has been produced (though I do not hesitate to dip in on the second and third day, even knowing that the crust will be chewy).

House of Pies seems to bake pies every day. It is easy to tell if a pie is over one day old. Meringues weep, crust becomes soggy, fillings shrink from the crust. Their crusts might be a little more hardy than a homemade crust for obvious reasons but they are still very good. And every time I go there they are pushing a large rolling rack to the refrigerated case to unload freshly baked pies. Of course not all bakeries make good pies but they do exist.

Most people who think they do not like pie labor under this delusion because they have confused pie with the dreadful things that are available in bakeries. Of these, the only positive thing that can be said is that probably no children were killed in the production process. We will not even speak of those premade pie crusts that you can buy in the refrigerator section. Except to note that anything cooked in one of these would taste even better if you just stuck the filling in a pie plate and cooked it by itself.

Did you know that nobody can do anything ever?

Unfortunately, making pie well requires skill and the aforementioned labor.

Yes, that is why you will spend $12 for a pumpkin pie at House of Pies, instead of, what, three or four dollars for evaporated milk, canned pumpkin, a few eggs, and small amounts of spices. McArdle thinks that paying employees is an abomination before the Lord.

These are not the easy delights of the layer cake, which can be mastered by anyone capable of reading the instructions for operating a stand mixer, and usually put in the oven in less than 20 minutes.

Not so fast, cupcake. Cake can be difficult as well--for some people.

Pie is a riddle wrapped in a mystery enclosed inside a crust that will toughen to the consistency of a brown paper bag if you overhandle it the least little bit. Yet at the same time, getting flakiness and the appropriate shape requires that you spend a lot of time slapping the dough around on a pastry board. Achieving this delicate balance requires practice and a spouse or a canine companion who will happily chew through your mistakes because, unfortunately, the only way you will know that you have erred is when you take that first bite.

Slapping the pastry around will eliminate any flakiness. You get the appropriate shape by rolling it out properly. It does take practice but millions of housewives managed to develop the skill. You know, those perfect homemade pie bakers McArdle keeps mentioning?

So why bother? Because, as I said at the top, pie is delicious. Done right -- and most of you have probably never had it done right, which moves me beyond words -- you get a delicate, almost velvety crust that melts in your mouth as the filling spreads over your tongue. Pie is well worth all the effort it takes to make it, and it will leave you with the satisfied feeling of having mastered a dish that is rapidly becoming extinct in these days of takeout and Pillsbury pie crusts. I'm just saying, it's not for the faint of heart.

Says the person who never managed to make the effort.

Before we can even get to recipes, we need to discuss the principles of learning to make pie crust. These are not even the principles of making pie crust -- we'll get to those in a minute -- but how you should approach the project if you are trying to teach yourself. 1.If at all possible, find someone who knows how to make really good pie crust. You are not looking for someone to teach you how to make pie crust -- I mean, it's nice if they offer, but watching them will prove surprisingly little help. The way you are actually going to figure it out is by making a lot of pie crust and determining what doesn't work, which is almost everything you will try. What you are looking for is someone to bake you a pie. That way, you'll know what it's supposed to taste like.

I learned by watching my mother. I still had to practice, as McArdle notes, and it took a while to master the technique but I knew what to do from watching her. She made so many pies that I couldn't help but learn. McArdle's mother was a caterer. Couldn't she have learned by watching her mother? I guess not, since "watching them will provide surprisingly little help."

This is why people think McArdle is a putz. Does she really think that nobody but she has ever had a good pie? Her bloviating hyperbole is incredibly annoying.

This will be a tricky task because most people who think they know how to make good pie crust don't. A surefire sign of someone who doesn't is someone who tells you that it's not that hard to learn. They are making terrible, tough pie crust and will lead you to a bad end.

Thank you, pie expert who can't make pie!

2.Buy 10 pounds of good unsalted butter (I'm partial to Land O'Lakes) the minute it goes on sale. Pie crust uses a lot of butter. You're going to be making a lot of pie crust. Use whatever you have left over to make layer cakes, to remind yourself that you really do know how to bake.

I am not going to buy 10 pounds of butter because I would prefer not to become a widow. I made an all-butter pie crust once when I ran out of Crisco and I was not very happy with the results. Crisco is very unhealthy as well but since I try to refrain from making too many sweets it's not a big issue.

There is not just one way to make crust. I use the way I know, which is reliable and successful for me. Others use different methods and different ingredients which have proven to be successful for them. I break all the rules of pie making and most of my pies are good. My meringue pies need some work but that is just a matter of more practice.

This is not rocket science. The pie will not explode on reentry. It doesn't have to be perfect.

3.Make the biggest pie-crust recipe you can find, certainly bigger than your pan. I taught myself to make pie crust using a recipe for a 10-inch pie, even though I did not own a 10-inch pie pan. Why? Because the first few times you roll out a pie crust, the results are likely to look a lot less like the beautiful circles pictured in cookbooks and more like some sort of shape that appears only in theoretical n-dimensional universes from science-fiction novels. Having more than you need means that you will still have room to cut a circle out of it.

Cut a circle out of it? Do people do that? You roll out the pie crust. You fold it over twice and put it in the pan. (Or drape it over a rolling pin or slide it off the silicone rolling mat or whatever method works for you.) Then you trim it if necessary. I wait until I put top crust on the pie and between the two crust there is always enough crust. You can even match top overlap to a skimpy bottom to correct any mistakes. Then trim it, roll the two crusts under, and crimp. Again, not rocket science.

4.Keep the pie itself simple: No prebaked pie shells. This is the most basic form of pie, and it is the easiest to learn.

Does that even make sense?

5.Get a good silicone rolling pin. It's less sticky than a regular one, which means you run a lower risk of toughening your crust by adding flour.

That is true but you need to flour the silicone pin. Most foodies tell you to use as little flour as possible when rolling out the dough; I believe Alton Brown, among others, say this. To a certain extent I ignore this advice and use however much I need to use to prevent the crust from sticking. McArdle believes in elite expertise and therefore can't get her pie crust off the counter. Alton Brown's pies are probably better than mine but as McArdle always says one can't let perfect be the enemy of good.

6.Use either a food processor or a pastry cutter. Messing around with two forks is a challenge for the amateur who doesn't know what it's supposed to look like in the first place. And using your hands is a recipe for tough, tough crust.

Does anyone use two forks anymore? It would help if she told her readers that the fat in pie crust melts in the oven and the rising steam makes the crust flaky. That is why you do not mix pie crust with your warm hands and take care when you use the food processor. I prefer a pastry cutter over a food processor but many people make very good crusts with the latter.

7.Make a lot of pies. Assume the first ones will be bad. (The filling will still be very tasty!) My grandmother, a legendary pie maker, had to throw her first pie crust out over the bank behind the house. My mother, another legendary pie maker, spent a holiday evening assembling her first pie crust in the pan like a jigsaw puzzle. My first pie crust was tough, about an inch thick, and nonetheless leaked filling everywhere. Maybe you will be the exception, but don't go in expecting it to be so.

We will revisit her mother's legendary skills in a minute.

The easiest, not-quite-foolproof-but-close crust recipe is the Cook's Illustrated Vodka Crust. Water binds with gluten, which can make your crust tough; adding alcohol gives you more liquid but fewer troublesome protein bonds. And what do you put into the crust? Well, the possibilities are endless: savory or sweet, fruit or custard, baked or chilled. On pie, I'm basically a purist. I tend to prefer a single ingredient rather than "mixed berry" or "pumpkin chocolate," and I don't like flavors that are overpowering, such as peanut butter. Nor anything that's so sweet it sets my teeth on edge; I prefer pecan bars to ooey, gooey pecan pie. And I have a dark horror of evaporated or condensed milk, which I find disgusting to look at and unpleasant to eat. Yes, they make it easier to get a custard to set properly, but I can't stand them, so the exciting world of icebox pies is largely beyond my ken.

::eyeroll::

I'm not criticizing other folks who like their pies drenched in molasses or towering with strongly flavored mousse or filled with condensed milk; as I've said time and time again, what you like is what you like, not a reflection on your character. But my taste is for a simple, old-fashioned pie that lets one ingredient shine.

Ha! I do believe she read my post on her mother's pumpkin pie. Of course I said a lacing of molasses, not a drenching, but it's not McArdle unless she's lying/exaggerating/mincing to make herself look better when she screws up.

The last thing I'll note is that if you can't get absolutely fresh fruit -- which is to say it came out of a farmer's market, roadside stand or your garden -- then in most cases, the best thing to do is use frozen. This is not true of apples or pears. But most other fruit is actually better frozen than from the produce section because the stuff in the produce section was picked green and shipped, while the fruit in the freezer case was picked ripe and immediately flash-frozen. Now, freezing fruit, especially berries, means it will release more liquid when it cooks, which can make your pie runny. But you can compensate for this by adding a little more of your thickener. (The recipes below use flour or cornstarch, but there are any number of exciting options once you get the hang of the basics).

Flour gives pie filling a pasty taste. There are plenty of alternatives, as she says.

Oh, and I promised to tell you the principles of making pie crust, didn't I? They are simple: •Freeze your butter. •Don't overhandle it. Don't overhandle it. Don't overhandle it. Stop! I see you there, tempted to give it just a few more pats. Let it be. Social interaction makes it very grumpy. Do the absolute minimum of work needed to get the butter and the liquid incorporated into the flour, then form it up and put it in the fridge. Do not fold, fondle, spindle or mutilate. Yes, you in the back, there is a technique where you smooth out small bits of dough with the heel of your hand and then pat the result into a ball in order to increase flakiness, but I am not going to tell you about it because frankly I don't trust you. Mix it up and leave it alone.

You would think that she were a pastry chef instead of someone who can't make pie, the way she lectures her kindergartners audience.

•Use as little flour as possible when rolling it out. •Always work with it cold. Pie crust is like a polar bear: It's antisocial, and it gets very uncomfortable when it gets warm. If you are having trouble getting the knack, and the crust is starting to get soft, pop it back in the fridge and try again in 15 minutes when it has firmed up.

After you make the crust you should put it in the refrigerator for at least half an hour for the fat to cool and the flour to absorb water. I have found that when you are making hand pies it's necessary to put the finished unbaked pies in the refrigerator for about 15 minutes as well but it shouldn't be necessary for one quick pie.

Now, on to the recipes. Because the person who asked is not an experienced pie baker, I'm going to stick to simple things: all baked pies, which require a minimum of custard- or curd-making skills and which don't have second steps where you top with meringue or try to spread chocolate onto your custard without breaking it. To my great sadness, I have also excluded the many delicious pies that can be made with uncooked eggs. I'll lead off with my family's recipe for pumpkin pie, which is about the easiest filling you can make. It's a simple custard that you pour straight into an unbaked crust: two eggs, some milk and a can of pumpkin.

We've met Mom's Pumpkin Pie before. It was pretty darn funny. I explain the problem with her mother's perfect pie in that post and in the comments I note McArdle's recipe retconning via Twitter.

Like I said, this post is largely a rehash of old material. You can skeddle over to her post if you want the additional recipes she offers.

Ah, but how do you roll out a pie crust? I hear you cry. That is what YouTube videos are for. There is no written description I can give you that will beat watching someone else do it. But watching will only get you so far. You're going to need to start rolling yourself as soon as possible.

But...but...didn't she just say you can't learn by watching? Ah, well. Those who can, do. Those who can't tell you to watch a video.

Ring Of Fire

The stupid. It burns like a West coast wildfire.

 Megan McArdle on Venezuelan inflation:

It's a bit of a mystery why this is happening. No, right, don't tell me: The government is printing too much money! Indeed. As Milton Friedman famously said, "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon." When too much money is chasing too few goods, prices rise. And the most common source of "too much money" is government printing presses. 

But I'm not asking for the mechanism; I'm asking for the reason. Why is the Venezuelan government resorting to the printing press?

One of McArdle's commenters:

Money • an hour ago  

Another writer who has no idea who prints money in modern economies. 97% of the money in modern economies comes from banks creating deposits when they make loans.  

Also, Friedman's views on money disapproved every day. He believed that the Fed could create inflation with QE; However, he failed to understand that reserves are trapped in the banking system.  

Venezuela is a failed state. That is why they have inflation.

She thinks "printing money" is literally printing money. Hahahaha!

I know next to nothing about monetary policy. McArdle knows even less. Every person who reads this post probably knows more about it than the two of us. But McArdle is paid six figures to discuss it.

The primary tool of monetary policy is open market operations. This entails managing the quantity of money in circulation through the buying and selling of various financial instruments, such as treasury bills, company bonds, or foreign currencies. All of these purchases or sales result in more or less base currency entering or leaving market circulation.

Added: This is the third day in a row that McArdle posted early in the day. Did an editor crack the whip at our heroine? Or did the news that Bloomberg will lay off political and government writers put the burr under her saddle?

What You Wish For

Matt Taibbi:

Trump isn't really a politician, of course. He's a strongman act, a ridiculous parody of a Nietzschean superman. His followers get off on watching this guy with (allegedly) $10 billion and a busty mute broad on his arm defy every political and social convention and get away with it.

People are tired of rules and tired of having to pay lip service to decorum. They want to stop having to watch what they say and think and just get "crazy," as Thomas Friedman would put it.

Trump's campaign is giving people permission to do just that. It's hard to say this word in conjunction with such a sexually unappealing person, but his message is a powerful aphrodisiac. Fuck everything, fuck everyone. Fuck immigrants and fuck their filthy lice-ridden kids. And fuck you if you don't like me saying so.

You finally have your Galtian Ubermensch, America. A man who "built that" with nothing but his innate superiority and a $660 million inheritance.

How do you like your fair-haired boy now?

Easy Solutions To Difficult Problems

...Suffer a sea change, into something rich and strange


Something odd is going on in McArdleland. For the second day in a row Megan McArdle has posted early in the morning. Her usual habit is (scanty) posting late in the afternoon. Is she looking for a new job? Has she taken up another job that occupies her afternoons? Has she taken up another man who occupies her afternoons?  Only time will tell....

Meanwhile back at the ranch nobody can do anything ever, including police oversight. BlackLivesMatter wants more police oversight and McArdle responds with her usual keen insight and deep knowledge base.

This problem has basically proven insoluble.

Thank you, girl Thought Leader!

A punitive oversight board pushes professionals toward a particular decision: to do nothing.

I thought libertarians were extremely concerned about who will watch the Watchmen?

In the vast caverns of McArdle's mind, the police are like teachers; too concerned with protecting their paycheck to do their job properly.

When professional groups decide what's good for the rest of us, it usually turns out that what they think is good for the rest of us is what's best for them.

That cuts the professionalism out of professionals, doesn't it?

But when a proposal comes up that will hurt them in some way, it's very easy for the professionals to see all the reasons against it, and to convince themselves that the world will be better off without it. And when it comes time to discipline a member for some offense, unless it is straightforwardly heinous, they will naturally sympathize with the accused, thinking of all the times they made mistakes that could have landed them in the same place.

McArdle has demonstrated this attitude many times. How can you criticize people for making mistakes when you make mistakes yourself? Anyone can be wrong any time since decision-making is just a crapshoot.  It is nothing but an excuse for being wrong all the time due to ideological bias.

But the police are also not like teachers.

People who have never done the job have no way of assessing the trade-offs that professionals make when they try to do something, and they tend to be unforgiving when the professionals make errors, as humans sometimes do when they make decisions.

McArdle believes professionals can and should be assessed, and controlled by cutting their pay . As she said yesterday:

Reforming schools is harder than it sounds, but persuading principals and teachers to change what they do looks like a trivial exercise compared with getting millions of people to radically alter the hours they spend each day with their children in the privacy of their own homes. For one thing, we're paying the teachers and can threaten to cut off the checks if they don't change.

We are paying cops as well. Why don't we just threaten to cut off the checks if they don't change? Problem solved!

Always Read The Study

Megan McArdle, on a study that paid parents to improve their parenting skills, to improve their children's success in school. 

The effects are real, but not miraculous. The first thing to note is that across the whole group, the improvements in both cognitive skills and noncognitive skills are positive and nontrivial, but not huge, either: about a tenth of a standard deviation on cognitive skills, about two-tenths that for noncognitive.

The actual study:

The impact of being offered a chance to participate in our parental incentive scheme
on non-cognitive skills is large and statistically significant (0.203σ (0.083)). These results are consistent with Kautz et al. (2014), who argue that parental investment is an important contributor to non-cognitive development.

Also:

Hispanics (48 percent of our sample) and Whites (8 percent of the sample) demonstrate large and significant increases in both cognitive and non-cognitive domains.

(Black students showed no improvement.)

Nobody can do anything ever!

Same Old Same Old

I have been very busy with work but now that school has started I hope to return to our regularly scheduled mocking. It has not helped that Megan McArdle is posting little more than half-assed rehashes of old columns. It's not easy to keep on making up new jokes about old idiocies. For example:

Friday Food Posts: 10 Tips on Cooking for One: McArdle read an article discussing American and European snacking habits. It seems that Europeans snack on fruit and vegetable mainly while Americans snack on highly processed foods crammed with fat and sugar. Naturally McArdle's take on the superiority of European eating habits was to ignore the issue altogether and quote someone who says that Americans snack because cooking is too hard. She then repeats the same eating advice she has given in many other posts. Ka-ching!

McArdle wrote a couple of posts about Donald Trump, much to her commentariat's displeasure. They mostly like the Trump's trumpeting and do not look kindly on her scathing dismissal of the 25%'s hero. Because Both Sides Do It, we learn that the Republicans want to magically solve their intractable problems but so do the liberals. Her entire liberal argument:

But I don't want to pick on conservatives especially; the debt ceiling mess was certainly debacletacular, but I've had similar versions of this conversation with innumerable liberals over the years.

Devastating! We all remember the times the Democrats tried to shut down the government, don't we?

McArdle "discusses" the Ashley Madison hack with a few trite observations that somehow prove liberals are losers.

The information age could end the age of individual privacy -- and the liberal revolution that came with it.

And the Ashley Madison scam in which the company lied about the number of women members proves that:

[...E]ither that many more men than women want to cheat (or at least see what their options are for doing so), or that more men than women are willing to have no-strings affairs with married people. This may be innate, or it may be culturally conditioned, but either way, it seems to be pretty powerful. It's definitely not evidence for feminists who wanted to show equality in casual sex drive.

Women are not interested in casual sex. Because vagina.

McArdle has taken a lot of swipes at liberals recently. The blatant idiocy of Trumpmania seems to be wearing on her nerves.

I'm an enormous fan of Jonathan Haidt's work. Nonetheless, I've always had two outstanding questions about it (and would note that these are not exactly questions of which Professor Haidt is unaware).  The first is simply whether his surveys capture the actual moral reasoning that people do, or represent people pretending to do the sort of moral reasoning they think they ought to do. Take two of the questions he asks about purity. One involves brother-sister incest in which every precaution is taken to prevent pregnancy, and leaves both parties feeling pretty good about the experience with no long-term side effects on the family. The other involves a man having carnal knowledge of his poultry before he cooks it and eats it for dinner.

When asked if these two things are morally wrong, American liberals and libertarians would tend to answer no. (Or try to get around the hypothetical by positing undetected harm from the incest, or the potential dangers of salmonella and/or freezer burn from the chicken.) And yet, I submit that if those people found out that a stranger exhibited such behavior, most would probably be less interested in becoming friends with that stranger. That's a moral judgement, but cultural norms among the secular educated elite don't give people any vocabulary to express it, and so they say that it's not wrong in the first place -- even though in the actual situation, they would probably still make a moralizing judgement about it. As I wrote last year, "It is clearly true that liberals profess a moral code that excludes concerns about loyalty, honor, purity and obedience -- but over the millennia, man has professed many ideals that are mostly honored in the breach."

The second issue is a simply a perennial problem for surveys that look at political and moral reason: What questions did you ask? If you give people a quiz on global warming, conservatives may look more ignorant and ideologically motivated than liberals. On the other hand, if you ask that same group how many prisoners are in jail for non-violent drug offenses, you may "prove" that liberals ignorantly and/or willfully underestimate the number. Another way of saying that is that liberals may indeed resort to reasoning from sanctity, group loyalty, and authority -- but the questions Haidt has asked simply may not capture that tendency.

This proves that "Liberals Can't Admit To Thinking Like Conservatives."  You have to do some work to find out that:

Haidt, Koller, and Dias (1993) found evidence for such an intuitionist interpretation. They examined American and Brazilian responses to actions that were offensive yet harmless, such as eating one’s dead pet dog, cleaning one’s toilet with the national flag, or eating a chicken carcass one has just used for masturbation. The stories were carefully constructed so that no plausible harm could be found, and most participants directly stated that nobody was hurt by the actions in question. Yet participants still usually said the actions were wrong, and universally wrong. They frequently made statements such as “it’s just wrong to have sex with a chicken.” Furthermore, their affective reactions to the stories (statements that it would bother them to witness the action) were better predictors of their moral judgment than were their claims about harmful consequences. Haidt and Hersh (in press) found the same thing when they interviewed conservatives and liberals about sexual morality issues, including homosexuality, incest, and unusual forms of masturbation. For both groups, affective reactions were good predictors of judgment, while perceptions of harmfulness were not. Haidt and Hersh also found that participants were often “morally dumbfounded”(Haidt, Bjorklund, Murphy, 2000), that is, they would stutter, laugh, and express surprise at their inability to find supporting reasons, yet they would not change their initial judgments of condemnation. It seems, then, that for affectively charged events such as incest and other taboo violations, an intuitionist model may be more plausible than a rationalist model. [my bolding]

So the venomous bitca lied about liberals' morality to feel better about herself. Good luck with that.

Those Youths Of Today!

Predictably, the grown-ups of today do not like to listen to the whining of today's youth, who absolutely must have been coddled because they are so sensitive and angry. Helicopter parents created a crop of university students who are too, too delicate for this world. From Undercover Blue at Hullabaloo.

In September's Atlantic, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt examine how the embrace of "emotional reasoning" in higher education today "presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm." Instead of challenging them and preparing them to fend for themselves intellectually and emotionally, the notion that "words can be forms of violence" may, the authors argue, be "teaching students to think pathologically."
This is the opposite of how cognitive behavioral therapy works to minimize distorted thinking that leads to depression and anxiety. The object is to teach coping mechanisms, to desensitize patients to what today are called "triggers":

Therapy often involves talking yourself down from the idea that each of your emotional responses represents something true or important.
Emotional reasoning dominates many campus debates and discussions. A claim that someone’s words are “offensive” is not just an expression of one’s own subjective feeling of offendedness. It is, rather, a public charge that the speaker has done something objectively wrong. It is a demand that the speaker apologize or be punished by some authority for committing an offense.

First of all, any criticism of universities must acknowledge the enormous push to de-power the workers and empower the powerful. The very wealthy are paying a lot of money to fight "political correctness" on campuses. The most obvious reason is a libertarian adoration of free speech but libertarianism is little more than a cover for billionaires' causes. The right believes that campuses turn good little conservative children into evil atheistic adults and the Koches are children of a Bircher, but, and perhaps much more important, university research sometimes makes millions for its researchers and the university.

This is the reason Megan McArdle writes so many articles defending campus rapists. She gave the keynote speech for FIRE in 2013. And she has obviously received the memo because she also criticizes helicopter parenting. It's easy for people to join in on the fun condemnation of the young and everyone always thinks the young of today have it easier than they did but one thing has not occurred to any of the pointers-and-laughers.

The kids are right. Not all of them all the time, but their time is no different than any other. They are the victims of sexism and racism. They are abused by parents and relatives and cops and strangers. And they did not learn as we were forced to learn to bury the pain, defend the abusers, wave the flag and salute Mom (who cursed and hit them) and Country (which sent them to an Iraqi meat grinder) and Capitalism (which stole their future and handed it to billionaires to piss away, literally when it comes to $500 dollar bottles of wine).

They were raped and they refuse to shut up about it for fear of being called a slut.

They were robbed and (unlike their parents) refuse to kiss the ring of the thief because he is on tv and f*cks beautiful women.

They are traumatized and want that trauma to be acknowledged and addressed.

What do they get instead? The same thing the young always get when they cry out at injustice.

Mockery. Tear gas. Name calling--spoilt, lazy, entitled, un-patriotic, ungrateful brats.

Listen to what they are trying to tell you.

But no, everybody is listening to the freaking libertarians.

Playing in dirt builds immunity. But as mankind moved from the farm to an urban environment, less exposure at an early age to microbes and microflora has weakened our immune systems. Now universities seem intent on fostering a sanitized, "bubble boy" intellectual environment free of "microaggressions," and one that reinforces hypersensitivity and hypervigilance.

There is nothing more obnoxious in our society than a victim. Whine, whine, whine. It's all they ever do. They're losers. Bubble boys. Social Justice Warrior Tumbler Twitter girls. Sooooo obnoxious! So sensitive!

 People don't look up for the source of problems; they look down.

But the creepier part of this trend Lukianoff and Haidt only hint at is the digital tarring and feathering of alleged offenders you can see any day on social media by online mobs. Faculty must worry that their careers can be ruined over some real or imagined offense for which there is no response except to make public obeisance. Callout culture works like that, or #BowDownBernie. 

My last semester as an undergraduate, I took a course in Chinese history. Mao had just died. The Cultural Revolution had just ended. I bought a subscription to China Pictorial, one of their propaganda magazines. It was filled with scenes of happy, smiling, air-brushed faces of cadre members merrily harvesting crops, performing in stadium-sized flag routines, and sitting around the commune sternly engaging in daily self-criticism and ritually denouncing counter-revolutionaries Madam Mao, Lin Biao, and the Gang of Four for crimes against the people's revolution. 

It was creepy to me then. It's creepy now.

Worry about FIRE and the Koches and the Gates. They are far, far more dangerous to academics and they will prevail. The students will not; they are already dismissed as powerless, whiny cry-babies.

Less Libertarian McArdle

Megan McArdle uses many, many, many words to agree with Ross Douthat about birth control and abortion. McArdle is far too authoritarian to understand that it is none of her business if another woman does or does not want an abortion. McArdle sees access to necessary health care for women as a privilege that can be bestowed or withheld for political advantage.

Let The Joyous News Be Spread!

While I wasn't looking I accumulated over a million page views. Woo hoo!

During this time Megan McArdle has managed to fail up to spectacular heights and accumulate a tidy little fortune. I would not say my business model has been a successful one but it has amused me from time to time.

Liar

Megan McArdle said this:

 Like a lot of journalists, I get hung up on that pesky issue of "truth." Truth is our job. All we have is the public trust, and every time someone fails to do the work of vetting stories, the whole profession suffers.

Isn't that a precious bit of bullshit? Nothing happens when pundits lie unless the powers-that-be want to get rid of them anyway. They move on to the next place of employment or are given a raise or a better job.

Megan McArdle, In Short

Megan "Koch-head" McArdle: Scott Walker is the victim of a heinous injustice and "There are worse things than campaign finance violations."

McArdle utterly ignores the prosecution's side of the case and of course does not mention the rampant judicial conflict of interest. She ignores all of Walker's history in Wisconsin and peddles National Review talking points. One day she will be run over by an Uber driverless car which failed to recognize her as human.

David Brooks, Liar

David Brooks is my name
America my nation.
Fantasy is my dwelling place
Reverie my destination.


David Brooks is a liar. It is both his job and his inclination. It is the only way he can be one of the elite, in every sense.  He lives in the Fantasy Island in his head where rich people can grant his wishes. But there was always a catch on the island: be careful what you wish for because you have no idea what will the fantasy will cost you. Brooks has lied so deeply and for so long and with such fervor that he now believes his lies and can no longer tell reality from fantasy. He is deeply and utterly confused by the cognitive dissonance and he would really like all y'all to just shut up and stop trying to force reality into his fantasy.

Brooks can't keep out everything, however. The times, they are a-changing,  just as they did in the 1960s. The era of white privilege is under attack by interlopers who don't belong in Brooks' America. Sure, the white rich still control the country but Brooks is not one of them; he is merely a well-paid servant, the butler who answers the door and keeps out the riff-raff, serves the wine in a silver bucket, and supervises the lesser servants.  The rich don't mind making little sacrifices to appease the peasants and keep the peace because people like David Brooks are the ones who will actually do the sacrificing.

Brooks know this. Servants understand their master' needs quite well; that is how they keep their jobs--anticipate the needs of their master and carry them out before the master has to ask. But now the rich need something that Brooks can't give them. He can't diffuse Black anger or undercut the power of mass action. He cannot force his fantasy on these Others' reality. 

Brooks' job is to whitewash economic exploitation of the masses. Because he is not especially intelligent he uses the same method as everyone else to control other people: morality. But White (Judeo-)Christian authority will not achieve the rich's goals. They need a minority to give them moral authority over minorites.

They need Ta-Nehisi Coates, who does not want to lead a movement or tear down the power structure. Like Obama, he wants to join it. He does not speak violently; he can be reasoned with and he is careful to protect his career. Brooks sees the writing on the wall and it terrifies him.

So he lies his fool head off.

Listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates While White  

Brooks is not listening; he is lecturing.

Dear Ta-Nehisi Coates,  

The last year has been an education for white people.

This last year scared me to death.

There has been a depth, power and richness to the African-American conversation about Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston and the other killings that has been humbling and instructive.

The conversations about the above utterly bypassed me and made me look useless. That frightens and angers me.

Your new book, “Between the World and Me,” is a great and searing contribution to this public education.

I have to say this so I can tear you down later.

It is a mind-altering account of the black male experience.

My mind was not altered but it made an impression on me; is this the future? Will I no longer be of any use?

Every conscientious American should read it.  

When you read Coates remember my disapproval. That is what counts.

There is a pervasive physicality to your memoir — the elemental vulnerability of living in a black body in America.

Black people are so... physical. And there is no way I can exploit their experience to my own benefit!

Outside African-American nightclubs, you write, “black people controlled nothing, least of all the fate of their bodies, which could be commandeered by the police; which could be erased by the guns, which were so profligate; which could be raped, beaten, jailed.” 

Written as a letter to your son, you talk about the effects of pervasive fear. “When I was your age the only people I knew were black and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid.” 

But the disturbing challenge of your book is your rejection of the American dream.

My job is to sell the American Dream. My job is in jeopardy!

My ancestors chose to come here. For them, America was the antidote to the crushing restrictiveness of European life, to the pogroms. For them, the American dream was an uplifting spiritual creed that offered dignity, the chance to rise. 

Nothing is more conducive to social advancement than being a Jew in the 1800s.

 

Your ancestors came in chains. In your book the dream of the comfortable suburban life is a “fairy tale.” For you, slavery is the original American sin, from which there is no redemption. America is Egypt without the possibility of the Exodus. African-American men are caught in a crushing logic, determined by the past, from which there is no escape. 

You write to your son, “Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.” The innocent world of the dream is actually built on the broken bodies of those kept down below. 

If there were no black bodies to oppress, the affluent Dreamers “would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism.” 

Look at how angry he is, White America!  He blames you and your ancestors and your culture--the greatest in the world--for his people's exploitation!

Your definition of “white” is complicated.

Your definition is "white" is wrong.

But you write “ ‘White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining).” In what is bound to be the most quoted passage from the book, you write that you watched the smoldering towers of 9/11 with a cold heart. At the time you felt the police and firefighters who died “were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.” 

You obviously do not mean that literally today (sometimes in your phrasing you seem determined to be misunderstood).

You are an angry Black male, the third most frightening thing in the universe after Muslims and pretty young white women. You have a belligerent chip on your shoulder. You are a liar; you do not mean what you say.

You are illustrating the perspective born of the rage “that burned in me then, animates me now, and will likely leave me on fire for the rest of my days.” 

I read this all like a slap and a revelation.

I felt insulted. How dare you call my superiority exploitation?  But the publication of this slap was a revelation. Am I still relevant? Is my job really in jeopardy?

I suppose the first obligation is to sit with it, to make sure the testimony is respected and sinks in.

I guess I have to listen to you. It's part of my highly paid job as Inspector Of Public Morals.

But I have to ask, Am I displaying my privilege if I disagree?

Am I going to be attacked by the Twitter mob if I try to attack to protect my job? They are legion; I am merely one servant.

Is my job just to respect your experience and accept your conclusions?

What do I do here? I'm totally lost. Do I listen? Attack? Pretend to understand? Just give you my Moral Authority badge and give up?

Does a white person have standing to respond?

Am I passé?

If I do have standing, I find the causation between the legacy of lynching and some guy’s decision to commit a crime inadequate to the complexity of most individual choices.

Okay. Gear up, soldier. This isn't our first rodeo. Let's pull out the same arguments that have served me well for decades.

I think you distort American history.

Oooh, good one! I studied history, I can pretend to pull this off.

This country, like each person in it, is a mixture of glory and shame. 

We are all sinners. That always works!

There’s a Lincoln for every Jefferson Davis and a Harlem Children’s Zone for every K.K.K. — and usually vastly more than one.

It doesn't make any sense but my readers have been so thoroughly trained in "both sides do it" that they won't even notice.

Violence is embedded in America, but it is not close to the totality of America. 

For me. For you, who cares?

In your anger at the tone of innocence some people adopt to describe the American dream, you reject the dream itself as flimflam.

Yeah, innocence is good. We're not venal, we're innocent. We ain't no delinquents, we're misunderstood. Deep down inside of us is good!

Damn, where is my West Side Story album? Did the ex get it? Sigh. 1960 was a great year.

But a dream sullied is not a lie.

Sure it is but that dream is my bread-and-butter. Without it I would be Lou Grant instead of David Fucking Brooks.

The American dream of equal opportunity, social mobility and ever more perfect democracy cherishes the future more than the past.

See, if you sell hope and dreams you don't have to actually change the present. It works great.

It abandons old wrongs and transcends old sins for the sake of a better tomorrow. 

You can drag it out forever. It's a Freidman Unit!

This dream is a secular faith that has unified people across every known divide.

Dream, dreams will keep us together. Think of me babe, whenever some sweet talking Coates comes along, singing a song. Hear with my words and you wont hear a sound!

Damn, I'm good.

I bet she took my Captain and Tennille album too.

Ahem, I mean that a divided house will not stand and a falling house won't pay my bills.

It has unleashed ennobling energies and mobilized heroic social reform movements.

Your dreams give you noble energy to be heroes. Social progress comes from believing that America is fair and good, not from anger and riots and protests. Sounds good (::fistpump::), and it'll undercut Coates' authority.

By dissolving the dream under the acid of an excessive realism, you trap generations in the past and destroy the guiding star that points to a better future. 

Reality destroys fantasy. Fantasy made me rich. Reality is destroying me. Exterminate the Doctor Coates! Exterminate!

Maybe you will find my reactions irksome. Maybe the right white response is just silence for a change. In any case, you’ve filled my ears unforgettably.

Maybe I shouldn't say anything. If I ignore him maybe he'll just go away. In either case I pretended to listen and what else does he want from me? My job?

Shit, man. He wants my job and he might get it.