Business is Good
For my own sanity, I’ve laid off the McCardle reading for a while, but I just wanted to see what kind of nonsense is going on over there. Currently on the front page from the last week:
1.) a Mental Health Break (don’t get your hopes up, it is a video, and not her resignation).
2.) a “both sides are bad” post about the Rand Paul curbjaw incident.
3.) a personal blog spat in which she explains that it is ok that her rhetoric today is diametrically opposed to her rhetoric in 2003 because she apologized or something in 2008.
4.) Another mental health break.
5.) Megan fainting over a blog post by Jon Chait.
6.) Two posts about gentrification and her new house, including her famous bus anecdote.
7.) Navel-gazing about the Supreme Court.
8.) Megan fainting over a mistake a tv host made.
9.) Another mental health break.
The Atlantic is really getting their money’s worth. And I might suggest more mental health breaks. One every three posts doesn’t seem to be working.
I thought mental health breaks required a functioning mind to be of use. I can see that McArdle and her commenters have a single thought.. but where’s the cerebral cortex?
October 26th, 2010 at 2:04 pm
mcmegtard’s pic should be next to the definition of “failing upward”.
October 26th, 2010 at 2:06 pm
Here’s how Teh Atlantic can assure themselves they’re getting their money’s worth: McMegan pays them a thousand bucks for each post, and five bucks for each comment agreeing with her and lauding her for bravely standing up to librul foolishness.
October 26th, 2010 at 2:06 pm
To conform to McMegan’s MO, you should mention “some posts” about mental health breaks, not link to anyone, and say “I’m not going to do your work for you.”
October 26th, 2010 at 2:13 pm
You might do the same with RedState. With the midterms so close, the patriot fever over there is running high. Yesterday, one frontpager barely able to restrain himself had a post…
And Even STILL I Am Not Allowed To Make A Racial Slur About Our President? After THIS? AYFKM
?!?
Over/under on how long before he lets ‘em rip? Watch out for this teabagger, he’s ready to blow!
October 26th, 2010 at 2:15 pm
I’m pretty impressed by the per day rate of the posts. Sometimes she even gets 3 posts a day. Must spend the rest of that time researching.
October 26th, 2010 at 2:15 pm
The Atlantic wanted a controversial and polarizing figure to stir up the peanut gallery and get her website some serious page traffic.
And nothing gets hits like saying something completely asinine on the front page of a historically significant magazine.
Besides, nothing moves newspaper like a good highly publicized and polarized curb stomping, so everyone is covering it. Gotta play that devil’s advocate card or you’ll get lost in the shuffle.
October 26th, 2010 at 2:15 pm
@Tsulagi:
You know, RedState doesn’t make me crazy at all. It’s just so predictably stupid that it bores me.
October 26th, 2010 at 2:18 pm
I love the Atlantic.
It’s just how I feel.
October 26th, 2010 at 2:21 pm
So her mental health breaks are like when you go Galt?
October 26th, 2010 at 2:22 pm
I don’t buy McMegan’s bus story at all- a glibertarian riding publicly subsidized transportation? Would Ayn Rand ride the Circulator? I think not!
October 26th, 2010 at 2:22 pm
This is entirely fuera de tema but in Spain, prostitutes are now being obligated to wear reflective safety vests just like highway workers, which you see in the accompanying photo here.
It’s also been rumored that people are starting to spot five women standing around just to service one Juan, but this is not corroborated.
And that’s your news from Europe, now back to your regularly scheduled ridicule of Glibertarianistas.
October 26th, 2010 at 2:22 pm
Well, Ta-Nahesi has been leaving a lot of open threads while he writes or researches or reads or whatever, so Both Sides Do It.
October 26th, 2010 at 2:23 pm
@Tsulagi: Wow. That guy should just go hang out on Stormfront’s boards; he can use all the racial slurs he wants without having to pretend Obama made him do it.
October 26th, 2010 at 2:24 pm
in mcmagen’s defense…anybody wading thru her constantly math challenged bullshitting needs ALL the mental health breaks they can get…she’s thinking of their needs, not her word count…
October 26th, 2010 at 2:26 pm
@Judas Escargot: Judas Escargot is one great nick.
Another of my all time favorites was “Huddled Mass”, which gets extra credit if it’s someone in Massachusetts, but I never found out and can’t remember where I saw it.
October 26th, 2010 at 2:26 pm
Alan Keyes, other birthers, ordered to pay Obama’s court costs after Court of Appeals upholds lower court throwing out birther suit:
October 26th, 2010 at 2:27 pm
@Malraux:
What amazes me is that she has fans/defenders in her comments. She doesn’t have what typical glibs/wingers like for the women in their tribe to have, which is meanness, looks, fundie beliefs and stupidity. She’s sloppy and defensive, not stupid. Maybe her defenders in the comments are all her sock puppets. That would explain why she doesn’t post very often.
October 26th, 2010 at 2:29 pm
Where else am I supposed to go for awesome basketball shots by aussie teenagers?
October 26th, 2010 at 2:31 pm
She posted again about it? Sheesh.
@Zifnab:
Well, at least they wanted the traffic. Did they get it?
October 26th, 2010 at 2:31 pm
@DougJ: LOL. I admire (and appreciate!) you for reading that stuff and posting about it. I barely have the stomach anymore to read about the screaming loonies on the right; their utter disregard for facts makes my head hurt. This blog and Benen’s place are my island of sanity in a country gone crazy.
October 26th, 2010 at 2:32 pm
@DougJ:
Yeah I know, but I go over there every now and then for a laugh. It’s 11D stupid there.
On the RS post I linked, I like how he even worked into the title he’s a victim. He’s still “Not Allowed” to call the President a n***er or other racial slurs bouncing in his head. Oh the inhumanity. Their vision of Surfer Dude Jesus is weeping.
October 26th, 2010 at 2:34 pm
@Tsulagi:
That post about the back of the car was so dumb, I don’t even know where to start.
October 26th, 2010 at 2:36 pm
And my favorite part of McArdle’s 2003 blog post was the following comment:
“The irony is that the anti-globalist twerps chose to protest in NYC for many of the same reasons that Osama bin Laden decided to terrorize the city. Pretty pathetic lot of punks, when you really think about it. I hope they get out of line, but I doubt any amount of beatings to the head will help them.”
Posted by John Cole on February 4, 2003 at 2:32 p.m.
I especially love the part where you use your name to link back to Balloon Juice.
My, my, weren’t you just the violent man back then. Where’s your apology?
October 26th, 2010 at 2:38 pm
Having an Atlantic column is a sweet gig. Hell, I can run a blog that posts nothing but “Mental Health Break”s or “Open Thread At Noon”s and I’ll do it for half the price.
October 26th, 2010 at 2:38 pm
I think I will refrain from posting a derogatory jibe about her lack of work ethic as I take a quick break from work to read Balloon Juice.
October 26th, 2010 at 2:39 pm
@rob!: But can you post other people’s windows?
October 26th, 2010 at 2:39 pm
@Tsulagi: Out of morbid curiosity, who “doesn’t allow” him to call the President a racial epithet? Is he prevented from doing so by the RedState posting guidelines? Fear of invisible ACORN ninjas attacking him on his way to the grocery store? His mind wants to, but the orbiting lasers run by the UN keep his fingers from typing the words?
Or is it simply that he wants to use those words, but doesn’t want to suffer through the backlash associated with them?
dms
October 26th, 2010 at 2:51 pm
I hope someone invents a time machine so I can go back in time and push Church Lady’s pregnant mother down a flight of stairs.
October 26th, 2010 at 3:00 pm
I’d say something snide and clever here but I’m taking a mental health break. I just thought myself important enough that I felt I should announce that.
October 26th, 2010 at 3:02 pm
@dmsilev: All of the above.
But you also got to work in jackbooted union thugs. You know, like waitresses in SEIU.
October 26th, 2010 at 3:04 pm
@Cat Lady:
This would be a great title/chorus for an alt-country divorce song.
Q: Are the mental health breaks for Meagan or her readers? Any regular readers there could use a tumbler of single malt more.
October 26th, 2010 at 3:04 pm
@p.a.:
hmmm.. something like this?
You’re sloppy and defensive
But I don’t think you’re dumb
Honey, why don’t you suck
My thumb
To the tune:
Why don’t we get drunk?
October 26th, 2010 at 3:11 pm
If she and fellow Comforter of the Comfortable Sullivan would go all mental health break all the time the internons would be 50% less stupid.
Shouldn’t that be four women standing around while one does the work?
October 26th, 2010 at 3:12 pm
@Church Lady: What part of the previous 5,000 apologies have you missed?
October 26th, 2010 at 3:18 pm
@p.a.:
Neither – they exist to push posts where she’s been eviscerated by the commentariat off the front page.
October 26th, 2010 at 3:18 pm
The irony is that the anti-globalist twerps chose to protest in NYC for many of the same reasons that Osama bin Laden decided to terrorize the city. Pretty pathetic lot of punks, when you really think about it. I hope they get out of line, but I doubt any amount of beatings to the head will help them.
As someone who was alive in 2003, I will always happily remember the pro-war side as digesters of the most malignant and self-serving bullshit in American history.
October 26th, 2010 at 3:19 pm
@John Cole:
The beatings will continue until the apologies improve, obviously.
October 26th, 2010 at 3:19 pm
@Modulo Myself: Dude- check the archives here. Half the people posting on that thread used to be commenters here. They all left when I “lost my mind.”
God, I was such an asshole.
October 26th, 2010 at 3:22 pm
@Church Lady:
Yeah, it’s kind of the entire blog. The underlying concept is ‘What Was I Thinking?!’ by John Cole.
In actual practice it’s mostly a moderate-liberal discussion group, mostly focusing on politics and how the media reacts to it. You know, which is why I’m here, personally. I don’t eat cats and I’ve never been a food person.
October 26th, 2010 at 3:25 pm
@John Cole:
Well, you still root for the Steelers, so there is some continuity on the ass-hole front ….
October 26th, 2010 at 3:26 pm
@John Cole:
Yes, but your rants make up for it in droves.
October 26th, 2010 at 3:27 pm
@Uloborus:
Made up of latte-sipping, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing snarling packs of vicious jackals….. also too Tunch
October 26th, 2010 at 3:30 pm
John, totally aware of your conversion. Hell, I used to read Balloon Juice back in your heathen days. It was just slightly stunning to come across vintage 2003 writing, and feel the same deep gulf that was there before.
And for the record, I was an asshole in 2003, and I was out in the cold, marching with a few dipshits with puppets yelling ‘Our Streets’ and a bunches of non-dipshits as bewildered and frustrated as I was.
Being an asshole (doing a bunch of coke or sleeping with a slightly-unstable ex-model/pro-dominatrix, who you plan on fucking over in the end, for example) or making a subjective error in one’s calculations, as Megan would love to have us believe she made, may not have had anything to do with it.
October 26th, 2010 at 3:35 pm
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Right back atchya. The ‘Judas” seems to trigger the filters for many other blogs’ comment systems, though.
Nor am I the drummer from the midwest (and porn enthusiast) who started coming up on google searches after I took this name.
Though, quite frankly, if one must be mistaken for someone else, it might as well be a drummer and porn enthusiast from the midwest.
October 26th, 2010 at 3:44 pm
@El Cid:
I’m reading this, and the bit about the typo with the elector fascinates and provides insight to me. It highlights that one of the core and defining traits of the conspiracy theorist is that ‘coincidence’ is simply not an explanation they can accept. It’s sort of a reverse Occam’s Razor. If it seems ridiculously unlikely to you that a change of one letter in different documents could be some kind of trivial error or random happenance, then it immediately starts seeming reasonable that there’s some kind of vote rigging conspiracy involved. It would explain why they seem to have difficulty grasping that other people might not agree with their arguments, and why they never cover the ‘coincidence’ angle or feel the need for much evidence. If coincidence is just not something you can understand, then laying out your theories should immediately cause people to rally around you because you’ve cracked the code.
EDIT - And there has to be a code, because if coincidence and mundane human error aren’t factors then anomolies become by far the most importance pieces of evidence. The wording of constitutional amendments becomes less important than whether or not ‘citizen’ is capitalized.
October 26th, 2010 at 3:46 pm
From Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, et. al. to Megan McCardle. They had a good 140 years or so before Michael Kelly destroyed a venerable institution.
October 26th, 2010 at 3:47 pm
@Uloborus: Remember, the Proctor and Gamble symbol was a Satanic message. Just look at it. It doesn’t matter how irrational this seems, nor why a company which is maintaining itself as covertly Satanic would put an incriminating logo on its products. You have to just know how these things work.
Our airspace is being invaded by invisible creatures we in the know call “rods“. The government is poisoning us or maybe exerting mind control by spraying gases in the sky we see as contrails. And the Moon landing was all made up.
Obama is about to declare martial law. The dollar is about to be banned and replaced by the Amero . That’s if Mexico doesn’t repossess a third or more of the United States as its fifth columnists prepare La Reconquista.
Nothing you say or do will change the proponents’ minds.
October 26th, 2010 at 4:21 pm
@arguingwithsignposts:
Hells yeah. I’d love a book deal, too.
October 26th, 2010 at 4:47 pm
Being an asshole (doing a bunch of coke or sleeping with a slightly-unstable ex-model/pro-dominatrix, who you plan on fucking over in the end, for example)
That was you. Thanks. I’m dating her now and still picking up the pieces.
October 26th, 2010 at 5:57 pm
Shorter: In 2003, Republicans shit themselves on an hourly basis.
October 26th, 2010 at 8:10 pm
Hey, do you know what’s exactly like a foreign terrorist attack? A domestic street protest!
—every Republican in 2003
October 26th, 2010 at 8:13 pm
@John Cole:
If anyone’s still reading this thread: is it too much to ask for some guidance to the archives? When did John Cole experience his apparent conversion? Just curious. I’m new here, obviously.
October 26th, 2010 at 9:52 pm
@parsimon:
2005, search for Terry Schiavo.
October 27th, 2010 at 12:14 am