McMegan’s written another 3000 worder in favor affirmative action for conservatives in academia. What I find galling is that she herself is in a profession — establishment media — with among the most extreme systemic ideological biases of any profession I am aware of. Jay Rosen has written about this before.
I’d like to focus on one issue in particular that Rosen does not touch on: the Iraq War and the fact that the overwhelming majority of people who blog at the Atlantic were for it. Here’s a rough list (since I am arguing with McMegan here, I don’t feel the need to research this too carefully, so there could be a few who expressed opinions that I am leaving out): Yglesias, Douthat, McArdle herself, Crook (Deputy editor of the strongly pro-war Economist at the time), Sully, and Jeff Goldberg were all for it. I’m guessing Fallows and TNC said things opposing it, though I am not sure. That’s six to two (I’m including “opinion” bloggers, not straight reporters), so 75%, not so different from the percentage of academics who vote Democrat.
The Atlantic situation on the war is a bit worse than the numbers tell. Sullivan was extremely strident about the war, Megan spoke in favor beating war protesters with 2×4’s, Goldberg wrote some of the worst pre-war propaganda, Yglesias supported the war (at the time) despite “being liberal”. In almost all cases, except possibly Douthat, their support for the war far exceeded what one might expect, given their general political predilections: libertarians were not uniformly gung-ho about the war, liberals were generally against it, and, well, hardly anyone was as explicit about calling anti-war people traitors as Andrew Sullivan was.
I doubt that this is a coincidence. This is a lot worse than the supposed “bias” McMegan talks about in academia, it’s a case of people being promoted specifically because of their political beliefs. McArdle writes:
we have a lot more people writing for us than you’ve named
Sure, plenty of straight reporter types, whose thoughts on the matter have never been expressed publicly, not many who writes opinions. That’s how it works .
John Cole
I was as bad as all of them, so I’ll just sit this one out.
Villago Delenda Est
McArdle is simply a dishonest sack of shit.
There is no other reasonable way to characterize her.
DougJ®
@John Cole:
But you “hired” nothing but people who opposed it, that is an important distinction.
asiangrrlMN
@John Cole: But you’re not sitting around bleating about the injustices perpetuated upon the beleagured conservatives at the hands of the dastardly liberals, are you?
DougJ, this is just easy pickings here. Imma grab my popcorn, sit back, and watch in enjoyment.
Morbo
@John Cole: Oh, you’re just jealous you didn’t parlay it into a writing gig at the Atlantic.
Villago Delenda Est
@John Cole:
John, but you’ve come back into the light.
That’s got to count for something…as is the fact that you’re willing to sit it out, as a further act of repentance for a position that you came to understand was wrong.
kdaug
For Sully, torture. For Cole, Shiavo.
Sooner or later, the intelligent ones snap out of it.
What does that leave?
Southern Beale
I think I started somethin’.
geg6
All I can say, Doug, is that, after dipping my toe into the cesspool of those comments (GW is, prima facie, a thousand times smarter than Nobama!), I admire your ability to troll these people. I can’t get further than the first few comments before I’m screaming with frustration.
singfoom
Uh,
I think McMegan McDeleted your McComment. Weren’t you the first comment on her Poor Conservatives Can’t Get Comfortable At LIberal Arts Schools post? It is no longer visible.
Most likely due to gastritis.
InDefense...
In defense of Andrew Sullivan – once he realized he was duped he became a very strong opponent of the war and of the warmongers who bulls**tted the country to get us into it.
(although his conversion from hawk to opponent may not change the original thesis, a turnaround that strong does deserve a mention)
DougJ®
@kdaug:
Sully’s back with conservatives again, fellating Mitch Daniels and scare-mongering over the debt.
pragmatism
her “its time to panic about the deficit” post is a howler as well.
Dave Ruddell
So what’s with the ‘ban me’ business?
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
@kdaug: Sullivan has snapped out of it?
I think he is still working his way through a Kafkaesque set of nested dreams.
agrippa
Jay Rosen wrote a good column ( the one that is linked to): it is complicated.
My own view is that politics and governing are separate. In fact, politics is often the adversary of governing. Politics is about ‘winning’; rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies. Governing means trying to do something constructive about real problems.
I think that is why you see such dithering or wailing and knashing of teeth when elected officials actually ‘try’ to tackle real problems.
The commentariat has real problem with governing as well. Much of the commentariat has a real rpoblem with fact and logic. Manyof them want to reward their friends and punish their enemies.
Southern Beale
Having said that, I want to live in a place where the university professors are all assuredly liberal hippies who love soshulism and spit on the troops. Here in Nashville, our local Gannett fishwrap hired Richard Grant, professor of finance and economics at David Lipscomb University, to write opinion pieces about politics.
Lipscomb is a conservative, right-wing Church of Christ college. You pretty much can bet his columns are going to be full of free market fairies and conservative loony fantasies. Here’s one from January where he talks about how Sarah Palin’s “character carries her through adversity.”
Would love to see some ideological affirmative action at play over at Lipscomb. Never mind, it won’t apply to private colleges.
kdaug
To clarify: specifically the war. Sully is not yet, um, unsullied in all respects.
But he shows evidence of being persuadable.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
kind of on topic, an institutional if not necessarily ideological bias in the Establishment Media: Der Clenis.
The public was roughly 70-30 against impeachment, among Villagers, I suspect the numbers were reversed, actually probably more than 70% in favor of conviciton and removal. They barely remember the invasion or Iraq, much less torture, suspension of habeas corpus, domestic spying, etc. But The Clenis still infuses their worldview.
Southern Beale
@singfoom:
No, it’s still there. Here it is.
Ash Can
@John Cole: The thing is, you’re able to say those three little words that these overpaid, underworked pundits can’t bring themselves to say: “I was wrong.”
(And for the record, I was wrong too. When Colin Powell made his case at the UN for the invasion of Iraq, I reluctantly acquiesced, believing that since it was Colin Powell saying it, it had to be so. We all know how well that turned out, don’t we?)
John Emerson
McMegan, Jonah Goldberg, Amity Schlaes, and maybe Douthat are all affirmative-action columnists. None of them have credentials or experience worth a damn, and several of them (not Douthat as I remember) frequently make gross, elementary errors.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@DougJ®: another institutional Village bias, this one based in class as much as herd thinking: a confused hatred of Social Security and an “austerity” friendly view of politics.
Southern Beale
@Ash Can:
Yes. I was wrong too. I never believed the Iraq War lies but I believed Afghanistan was the “right” war.
Damn but I was wrong. Hugely wrong. I’m sorry.
Elvis Elvisberg
Not only does McArdle know more about journalism than about the academy, she’s straining out gnats & swallowing camels.
Yes, if there’s bias in the academy (which remains unproven, but whatever), that is a bad thing. But it didn’t kill a million people.
But there is zero accountability in the media for punditry & reporting that enabled this catastrophic invasion.
Rob
How could you forget Micheal Kelly? There was no one more pro-war than he.
Keith G
Damn you Doug. I followed your earlier link to that thread. God what a waste. Here is one of my favorite Meagan responses:
She really needs to stop digging.
General Stuck
I got Megan fatigue, and for that matter, Cole fatigue, and pundit fatigue in general. Republicans always suck these days, even when they don’t. Democrats suck a lot less, but still suck. And politics rolls on, 95 percent meaningless, and 5 percent that matters to the free and unfree world.
Another month and it’s baseball season , and life will have rhyme and reason again.
geg6
@kdaug:
Ummmm, no. He’s positively unhinged today by the Obama budget proposal. You know, the one that proposes murdering all the children.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2011/02/obama-to-the-obama-generation-youre-on-your-own.html
Pooh
@John Emerson:
Nah, Douthat’s shtick was always to go on about great lengths about the moral quandaries he navigated before arriving at the doctrinaire Republican position on any and all matters.
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
@Ash Can: Seymour Hersh had me convinced that invading Iraq was a reasonable proposition.
Yutsano
@Southern Beale: I’m with you there. I believed Afghanistan was the right thing to do, the memories of the Soviet failure tweaking the back of my mind besides. But Dubya done fucked that up about as bad as the Texas Rangers.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel): Seriously? Hersh was pro-war? How did I miss that?
Dennis SGMM
OT: Shirley Sherrod is suing Andrew Breitbart. He was served the papers at CPAC.
Rev. Miller
Paying attention to the things that come out of the Atlantic, especially the things that come out of of Megan McCardle, is like going to one of those horrible sex shows in the Red Light District in Amsterdam.
Sure, it’s funny. Sure, it’s shocking. But then it’s just embarrassing for these poor ignorant people. Then it’s just embarrassing for you for watch.
I don’t need a ping pong ball that bad. That’s about how interesting semi-informed, mushy headed contrariness is. Ooooo, look what you did, you bad little kind-of-liberal. I’m intrigued and repulsed by your radical-in-that-NPR political views.
Bunch of bitches. The lot of them. If the building became infested with flesh-eating beetles it would be a greater service to mankind. Christ, is it really 6 months til football? Fuck.
Southern Beale
Unrelated … but did anyone notice those pictures of Dick Cheney from CPAC? He looks positively ghoulish, one foot in the grave. Definitely not a healthy man. If anyone is keeping a celebrity death list I’d put his name near the top … I hadn’t heard if he’d decided to get a heart transplant but I’m guessing not.
John Emerson
If you’re hired as a conservative, you need to keep producing the conservative or they fire you.
The first thing I read by Douthat complained that he was allowed to slack his way through Harvard (or wherever he was). I’ve never forgiven him. Motivated students at Harvard work their asses off just like anywhere else, and there are plenty of people who would have made good use of the education Douthat slacked on.
Napoleon
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/11/the-fifty-first-state/2612/
He really does not take a position in the piece, which tells you something about how anti-war voices were cowed by the warbloggers, but lays out the facts in a way that makes it clear that going to war would be insane.
And to echo what someone said above you missed the biggest cheerleader of them all, Kelly.
eemom
dude, your ass is soooooo gonna be banned like forever now.
Ain’t gonna talk your way out of this shit. Not even with that mild-mannered “to be fair” stuff for which you were formerly so famous. Tee hee.
Stooleo
@Southern Beale:
Don’t forget Belmont. They got Joe Scarlet who has a nice vanity project running the self named executive education program at the business school. He fancy’s himself the human embodiment of John Galt. Nice “government is the problem” screed here.
Yutsano
@Southern Beale: Under most transplant ethics guidelines he’s not eligible (age, relative health, survivability of aftereffects etc.) but it wouldn’t shock me if he still managed to get his evil claws on one.
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I don’t think Seymour Hersh was pro-war so much as an WMD believer. I seem to recall, and I may easily have muddled this in the mists of time, that he wrote New Yorker piece that said as much.
But this is making me doubt my memory: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1150
srv
I believe Fallows started as accepting the war would happen, and I don’t remember a strong yea or nay on it.
His 51st state piece was very good (Nov. 2002):
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/11/the-fifty-first-state/2612/
And he wrote Blind Into Baghdad, so he was a very active realist regardless.
Keith G
@geg6: Unhinged? Sullty typed that Obama was screwing over folk under 30. Me thinks he has passed onto full-on, rabid drama queen mode.
eemom
@Southern Beale:
Ah….sweet music to my ears. I am an unabashed Cheney death-watcher.
In other, not unrelated, comedy relief, y’all gotta check out TBogg today. It seems Doughtwat’s got a little BUN in the oven, haw haw.
dollared
@Yutsano: Still, in my mind there’s a huge distinction between Afghanistan (year 1) and Iraq. I was OK with Afghanistan, with a quick exit,no matter how chaotic. Iraq is a war crime. End to end, from day one. Being in Afghanistan now is a war crime.
freelancer
@geg6:
I’m under 30. Obama didn’t screw me. To the extent that he is screwing my generation, it’s that he’s not doing enough to build up a sustainable energy infrastructure, conserve potable water sources, and generally build a wall of protection around this country’s economic, manufacturing, and natural resources. However, those are his stated goals, and it’s absurd to think that he is the one standing in the way of precisely what he aims to do.
What a shit premise. The debt isn’t “entitlement-fueled”, whereas embracing Bowles would ruin Social Security, it’s not in debt, it’s “fueled” by current payroll taxes, and the fix required to keep it intact for future generations needn’t be dire.
That’s it. Game over. They’re reflexively wrong. McArdle started lazily worrying (as if she knows any other way) about the debt as soon as a fucking Democratic Administration came to power, and now, egged on by her colleagues, a week after CPAC and Egypt and everything else that has been going on, why now? Why Monday as the day for her and Andrew to shit themselves?
And as far as if I had to pick between Obama’s budget and Megan’s and Andrew’s budget, insomuch as which document would really screw people under 30? I think I know who to pick. Even if POTUS gets gastritis, I’ve heard tell of Austin Goolsbee being a wunderkind with a calculator.
General Stuck
@eemom:
It’ll probly look like Norquist.
Napoleon
@srv:
Fallows never took a position, which tells you everything about how the “nay” voices were silenced. Anyone who believed half of what he wrote in that article would conclude the war was completely insane, yet he never took a position against it.
polyorchnid octopunch
@Southern Beale: I’m not so convinced that Afghanistan was the wrong war… but how it was prosecuted was definitely very wrong.
Rick Taylor
I’d forgotten how many people I now respect who at the time supported, even if lukewarmly, waging a war that was so obviously insane.
Southern Beale
@Stooleo:
Right and don’t forget Vanderbilt’s anti-immigrant Carol Swain, the one who gushed about how teh awesome Michael Steele is on a local news group and wrote an op-ed in the Tennessean opposing Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize.
She also was a big “Draft Lou Dobbs” booster … love the liberal academics, don’t you?
Violet
I was against the was in Iraq completely. I was, however, for a police action in Afghanistan. I think both wars were handled poorly.
kdaug
@geg6: Ah. Hadn’t seen that.
I stand corrected.
Another Commenter at Balloon Juice (fka Bella Q)
@DougJ®: But you “hired” nothing but people who opposed it, that is an important distinction.
Even if he doesn’t pay nearly as much as the Atlantic. The work here is of universally higher quality, omitting Fallows from that of course, because it’s my thesis and I can.
Redshirt
I’ve felt like some sort of Nostradamus since about 1998 – everything I have forseen has come to pass. I was so sure about how the Iraq War Part 2 was going to play out I started a “When will we invade Iraq Pool” – five dollars to enter, get the day/week right, win the pool.
I knew exactly how the aftermath of 9/11 would play out.
And so on. It’s caused me some great confusion, since our media has been in a constant state of shock by all these things, or they are playing dumb on purpose.
I don’t know which is worse.
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yes, I have this completely backwards as this hilarious opinion piece from Slate shows:
http://www.slate.com/id/2082639/
So, what the fuck was I thinking of? Is this senility at last? I’m too young!
Pooh
@John Emerson: I dunno, I tend to think of claims of “slacking at Harvard” as being something of a HumbleBrag, rather than reflecting actual truth.
dollared
Doug, thanks for crawling in the sewers with Our Entitled Youth. McMegan is doing exactly what she is getting paid for – advancing themes that advance the interests of her wealthy sponsors.
The fact that hundreds of thousands have died in these pursuits, and trillions of dollars of the people’s money have been wasted in these pursuits, must never, ever be forgotten.
Valdivia
Sorry to keep harping on this but Sulli came back in a tear about the DEFICIT and his posts trashing Obama are making my blood boil. the Deficit is the new Iraq War. He even quotes McMegan on her panic. Kill me now.
liberal
@Napoleon:
If that’s true, that’s a big black mark against him.
Mannahatta
Fallows wrote an article before the Iraq War entitled, “The Fifty-First State?”
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/11/the-fifty-first-state/2612/
Nickel version: though he began the research for the article with a slight pro-war bias, over the course of his interviews he saw many reasons for trepidation. He may have written on the war closer to the invasion that took a stronger stand, though.
GregB
I think Sully must have been out getting re-programmed by the Borg. He’s back to being a full-bore douche.
Ash Can
@eemom:
What? Douthat’s having someone’s ass-baby?
General Stuck
@Redshirt:
You Too! I predicted everything would turn to shit, and it did.
Pooh
@Rick Taylor: On some level, the obvious insanity of it was almost a feature not a bug. I didn’t think it was a good idea, but I figured A) there’s no way the lie would be that big and B) they probably knew more about it than did I anyway.
Oops.
liberal
@freelancer:
Though what is true is that projections show government-funded health care spending exploding (at least pre-Obamacare) over the next few decades.
OTOH, the same ruinous exponential growth can be seen in private health care spending.
Alex S.
Sully must have read all the wrong publications during his break. Sad, his conversion process is back at the start.
I can ‘forgive’ the pro-war attitude of some people from back then. The Bush administration had handled the Afghanistan War pretty well up to that point. The Hussein-Al Qaeda connection ‘felt’ right, Powell was a very respected public official, there was a lot of patriotic frenzy. This breach of the public trust could hardly have been anticipated. Lots of Democrats, even some of the good ones voted for the war. But as it went on, as the situation in Iraq AND Afghanistan got progressively worse, there had to be a change of judgement, or some regret.
Valdivia
@GregB:
Exactly! The fellating of Daniels made me gag.
liberal
@Alex S.:
You must be high on crack. The Hussein-AQ connection didn’t feel right at all, given AQ’s ideology and the fact that Hussein was a brutal secular dictator.
FlipYrWhig
I demand the full spectrum of ideological diversity among clergy!
liberal
@Alex S.:
The only coherent explanation for someone like Waxman voting for the war, given how liberal he is in other ways, is the fact that he’s Jewish. (Since I’m Jewish, you’ll have to label me a self-hater.)
FlipYrWhig
@Valdivia: Is McArdle also filled with trepidation about how big her mortgage is and how hard it will be to pay it back?
CaptainFwiffo
Atheists are grossly under-represented in prisons. Does that mean prisons discriminate against atheists? I’m sure that anti-gay conservatives are not well represented on broadway – should we have conservative affirmative action for musical theater?
Calouste
@Southern Beale:
Cheney’s 23rd on deathlist.net, a new entry this year.
John Emerson
Pooh: it is possible to slack at Harvard. Once someone gets in the school wants them to graduate if only for USNWR rankings. No one gets in who isn’t sharp, and if they’re a bit lazy, they still might be very successful somewhere, especially with the Harvard Cachet.
FlipYrWhig
@Valdivia:
The trick is learning to suppress that reflex.
hilts
Speaking of liberals who supported the Iraq War, so did Ezra Klein.
Klein: “Jon Chait and I have fairly similar beliefs. We both supported the Iraq war out of an optimistic-liberal hawkishness that I think we both now consider to have been misguided, at least in that context.”
h/t http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/05/torn_apart_by_walt_and_mearshe.html
Given the fact that Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann have spent countless segments of their respective shows drooling over Ezra Klein, liberals should never forget that he was dead wrong about the Iraq War.
Would love to see someone at BJ compile a post of every liberal pundit who supported the Iraq War. If anyone knows of such a list elsewhere, please share the link.
Redshirt
Actually, I should have said “Cassandra” rather than Nostradamus, since no one believes anything I say ahead of time. Or it doesn’t matter.
But, it all seems blindingly obvious to me – and I know many of you as well. What’s concerning is: Why not everyone else?
Pooh
@John Emerson: I don’t disagree, its just that it’s a pretty common trope to be like “I’m so talented, I didn’t even work hard, and look where I am!”
Another Commenter at Balloon Juice (fka Bella Q)
@Valdivia:
Well it is Sully after all. Guy’s gotta fellate, so why shouldn’t Daniels get lucky this time?
catclub
@Ash Can: I was wrong too, sucked in by the comparison of how South Africa acted when it disarmed and how Iraq did. The veil was only pulled away for me when someone pointed out that ‘tactical uncertainty’ is much more necessary to Iraq, with an angry Iran as neighbor, than SA, with NO angry neighbors.
After that I was able to lok at all the evidence that they had nothing, and see it.
Turgidson
I renounce Stalin.
That out of the way, it’s to the point now with McArdle that I’m infinitely more surprised when she’s right or her “facts” are accurate than the other way around.
And Sullivan has always been an ignorant clown when talking about the deficit and entitlements, so his hysteria is hardly a surprise. Perhaps, after years of reflection and fitful progress, he’ll come to realize how much of an idiot he’s sounding like right now (as he has on some other topics). But I doubt it.
DougJ®
@John Emerson:
There are a lot of easy majors, yes. I don’t think you can slack in the sciences or the more elite humanity/social science majors (like that Social Studies thing), but there are certainly those where you can.
Svensker
@Alex S.:
Could have been anticipated and was, by many including moi, but those voices were silenced or ignored.
(But it’s hard for me to point too many fingers as I was a Bush supporter in 2000 and a “libertarian” before that. Mea maxima culpa.)
geg6
@freelancer:
And you, sir, give me faith in youth and the future. Sully? Not so much.
Valdivia
@FlipYrWhig:
I never read her but he quoted her and on nooes she is in a panic. I also saw that last week she wrote about the penury of second home mortages in NYC. More gagging.
geg6
@Napoleon:
THIS.
Mother fucking THIS.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@hilts: I’m willing to give Klein and Yglesias a pass since they were both about twelve at the time.
Silver
@Redshirt:
http://proxy.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?id=1250751
kdaug
@CaptainFwiffo:
You have any idea how hard it is for a good liberal to get into Pat Robertson’s Regent University?
I’m not talking tenure or faculty, just basic admission?
asiangrrlMN
@Redshirt: I’m with you. I didn’t follow politics then as much as I do now, but even then I predicted what would happen and how wrong it would be. The fact that the media was so gung-ho and rah-rah about it made me question myself quite rigorously. I really, really, really wish I had been wrong.
@CaptainFwiffo: OH HELL NO! You keep your hands off my musicals, thankyewverymuch!
catclub
@Pooh: Re-reading the ‘If its an actual good idea, you don’t have to lie to support it’
post ( linked to recently in LGM) is a great reminder.
Important corollary: Once they start lying to defend it, anything goes. So that lie will get as big as they find necessary.
Yutsano
@Calouste: Olivia De Haviland’s still alive? Dude, talk about a tough old broad!
John Emerson
I was reading Yglesias way back when he was a Harvard undergrad, and he started out more centrist than he is now. I was really surprised when he didn’t sign on with The New Republic.
Napoleon
@Calouste:
How is Keith Richards not on that list. Hell he was at the top of a similar list that some rock magazine kept back in the 1970s.
Redshirt
@Silver: Yep. That’s it! Glad to see I wasn’t the only one. But Hunter is just a higher level Cassandra, right?
goblue72
McMegan reminds me of every kid I’ve ever met who grew up upper middle class, private school educated in New York: sheltered, privileged, intellecutally lazy, and completely lacking the self-awareness that their life experiences were very atypcial compared to the average American. That and a tendency to whine about everything after they fail to get into/fall out of a highly paid life on Wall Street or with a management consultancy.
Course, the hypocrisy of McMegan runs deep:
http://www.alternet.org/health/141802?page=1
Ailuridae
@freelancer:
I’m under 30.
I would have never guessed that.
Folks on the left have been really, really bad about fighting back when conservatives lump all of the entitlement spending together. The best leftist tact I can think of would do something like:
Social Security is funded my current payroll taxes. With small, very popular adjustments it can pay out indefinitely at current rates. It could even be expanded (which will also be popular and might be a game ender for Democrats.)
Medicaid and Medicare do have a long term funding problem. But this is only because they are part of the larger health care cost crisis that is going to bankrupt America if not addressed. The causes of that health care cost crisis are primarily Doctor salaries and provider profits and Medicare and Medicaid do a much better job of managing those costs than the private insurers. You can’t get serious about America’s long term financial health without talking about a way to curb Doctor salaries and provider profits. Anyone who tells you otherwise weather they are talking about military cuts or ending food stamps is just lying through their fucking teeth.
Turgidson
@Svensker:
The Iraq experience was a real eye-opener for me. I was too young to pay attention to politics during the Reagan years, and the first Bush seemed like a real bore, but not evil (I was still young mind you) and HIS Iraq war seemed, and still seems, by comparison, like a noble undertaking, competently executed, for the general good. Then the Clinton years, aside from Bill being a scumbag in his personal life, seemed like an uncontroversial and competent presidency. My parents (bleeding heart mom; cynical libertarian dad) even agreed that he did a fine job, which was rare to see.
So it was pretty shocking to me that our elected leaders would so shamelessly lie and manipulate us into a war of choice. I know it took me a while to really accept the depth of their depravity.
To paraphrase what a dumb sack of hammers once said: Fool me once…shame on…me…won’t get fooled again.
Maude
@Calouste:
Thanks for the list. The doctors are the Deciders about patients getting transplants.
Mark S.
You know, the debt wouldn’t be so bad if we had single payer. But serious people don’t talk about things like that. We already have the best healthcare in the world (33rd in infant mortality, mother fuckers!)and all we need is some tort reform and to let insurance companies operate like credit card companies by going to whatever state offers the best regulatory environment.
It’s what Very Serious People think, and you can read them at the Atlantic.
Zam
@hilts: Wasn’t Ezra like 18 at the time? I’ll give him a pass on this one.
Calouste
@Napoleon:
You’re not the first one who asked that question:
Who, What, Why: How is Keith Richards still alive?
I think people have just given up on the idea that he’s going to die. Ever.
DougJ®
Fallows wrote some of the best stuff about possible problems with the war of anyone, so I’m putting him in the “against the war” category even if he wasn’t explicit.
CaptainFwiffo
Her big piece of evidence is still that show-of-hands anecdote. An anecdote isn’t data. It’s not even datum.
She also throws out a dubious statistic that the country is 20% liberal and 40% conservative. I’d argue that the reason why polls show numbers like that is because the public mostly doesn’t know what those words mean, and conservatives have been very good at demonizing the word “liberal”. People in academia are more educated, know what those terms mean and are better able to evaluate their rough position on the political spectrum. Polls of the public focusing on positions on issues instead of labels find a much more even split.
freelancer
@geg6:
Whoa, there. Hold your horses. I was flipping around cable last night while visiting my parents’ house, caught a few minutes of Jersey Shore and then the Grammy’s. Even if that’s not representative of my generation as a whole, we have a lot of work to do in the “not looking like total shitheads” department.
liberal
@Ailuridae:
I’m not sure that’s really true. I always figured the difference is that M/M have huge economies of scale, and they have much much less administrative costs. And don’t have to earn a profit.
Not just cut salaries, but get rid of the ridiculous amount of medical care that isn’t need or is based on questionable science. I’m 110% in favor of single payer, but I have no illusion that all we need to cut health care cost inflation is to get rid of the (admittedly useless) health insurance companies. And it drives me absolutely nuts when people say “treatment decisions should be for the patient and the doctor.” As if we can count on those two agents to conduct reasonable cost/benefit analyses and restrict treatment to evidence-based care.
catclub
@Maude: “The doctors are the Deciders about patients getting transplants.”
Not in Arizona if you are on medicaid — state gummint bureaucrats do the cutting there.
John Emerson
@Redshirt @Calouste: Richards has described the way he managed his addiction. Death usually comes from dirty needles or overdoses of heroin of unknown strength, and Keith took steps to avoid these problems. Pure heroin of known dosage has only mild negative health effects.
hilts
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: @Zam:
Ezra Klein was old enough to know better and should have.
trollhattan
@Southern Beale: @Turgidson:
Thanks for reminding me: Mistah Staling, he no good!
In a Colbert-like reaction from his gut, Sully was genuinely reviled by the torture issue that kept tainting and unraveling everything the Bush administration did WRT the war. He turned against them and shone his Sullylight(tm) on them and I think, somewhat atoned for his earlier foolishness. Not entirely, but there ya go.
He’s using that same gut to size up the fiscal stuff and frankly, that’s just not good enough. I don’t foresee a Road to Damascus moment for our Sully on this, which will keep him a RuPaulite ’til the bitter end.
Speaking of the war and the shamelessly unapologetic, did anybody catch War Criminal Rummy on NPR this morning? I don’t know how I didn’t break the radio.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2011/02/14/133692080/rumsfeld-offers-no-apologies-for-war-decisions
Ken Lovell
If conservatives are so woefully under-represented in academia, it is a matter of mathematical certainty that they are over-represented in other professions.
I look forward to calls in ‘The Atlantic’ for more liberals to be recruited by Wall Street and the military.
liberal
@DougJ®:
Still leaves one with the conclusion that he’s a damn coward.
asiangrrlMN
@CaptainFwiffo: Yes. It’s the same with the Republicans bleating that Americans wants the government to cut spending. Sure. Until you ask Americans exactly what they want to cut. Then, not so much on the cutting front. It’s all in how you word the questions.
Ailuridae
@DougJ®:
I’m not sure Fallows would or could answer even now but I wonder whether there was spoken or unspoken pressure on him to not come out strongly against the war in the pages of the Atlantic. Of the magazines that my conservative friends associate with “reasonable liberalness” there was almost a complete absence of serious anti-war sentiment and certainly nothing openly attacking the administration’s deceit. Yes that deceit was quite clear at the time but, no, it wasn’t discussed much of anywhere on the “reasonable left”
John Emerson
The really, really weird thing about the anti-Social-Security hoopla is that they’re telling young people that they’re saving SS, but in fact they’re weakening it. None of the reform proposals reduce payments to people who are already on SS.
That’s really the sinister thing about it. At no cost, aging conservatives collecting their checks can screw the younger generations in the name of fiscal responsibility.
And dumb young people will support the program out of generational envy, not realizing that the useless old people who are under attack now are their own older selves, 20 or 30 years from now.
Pooh
@catclub: Oh absolutely, that D-squared post is one of my go-to’s (along with “And a Pony” and Publius’s “George Bush and the Age of Irony”) for greatest hits of blog’s of yore.
Pooh
@Ailuridae: OT: but I responded to you in the “Home Cooking thread”…
catclub
@liberal: “Not just cut salaries, ”
As Dean Baker repeatedly points out: doing this requires importing doctors from other countries, or other means to expand the number of doctors, and to let them know that they will no longer be getting paid 3 to 5 times what similar doctors in other modern nations get.
Populist union busting, as it were.
We also need to do the same with CEO’s who get paid far more in the US than in comparable countries. Cause we’re number one! Wolverines!11!
DougJ®
@Ailuridae:
I looked at his pre-war stuff just now and it was pretty convincingly anti-war. It was straight reporting, not opinion, but as far as influencing debate, I think it did about as much as anything.
freelancer
Uh, thanks? I can’t quite tell if that’s a compliment or obvious snark.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Ailuridae: I’m sure things were terribly genteel at The Atlantic, but wasn’t Michael “Yosemite Sam” Kelly still running the show right up to his death?
and in the painfully unintentional irony of the day award:
The Michael Kelly Award
The Michael Kelly Award is for “The Fearless Pursuit and Expression of Truth”;[10] the prize is $25,000 for the winner and $3,000 for the 4 runners-up.[11] It is sponsored by the Atlantic Media Company.
Ailuridae
@liberal:
I’m not sure that’s really true. I always figured the difference is that M/M have huge economies of scale, and they have much much less administrative costs. And don’t have to earn a profit.
Medicare and Medicaid both pay substantially less than private insurers and what most doctors charge for out of pocket. Here is an NIH piece from 2001 putting the rates at 83% of private insurance (up from 62% in 1992). The American health care industry is a cartel profiting off an arbitrary supply constraint (we graduate far too few doctors) that is, in effect, bankrupting this country. Yes, single payer solves this but there are many other ways to get the same effect including reasonable freer market solutions.
Not just cut salaries, but get rid of the ridiculous amount of medical care that isn’t need or is based on questionable science. I’m 110% in favor of single payer, but I have no illusion that all we need to cut health care cost inflation is to get rid of the (admittedly useless) health insurance companies. And it drives me absolutely nuts when people say “treatment decisions should be for the patient and the doctor.” As if we can count on those two agents to conduct reasonable cost/benefit analyses and restrict treatment to evidence-based care.
Well it isn’t just salaries. For profit health care providers are a huge driving force in costs as well and, yes, they are often one and the same with a doctor’s group. During the health care debate there was a lot of talk about defensive medicine but none about doctor’s doing tests, cat-scans and the like that were almost certainly unnecessary because they were making money on the procedure.
kdaug
@freelancer:
Nah. The snark-fu is not strong in that one. Just means you sound as old, jaded, and bitter as the rest of us.
Cheers!
Ailuridae
@Pooh:
Ah good. I couldn’t remember what the thread was called.
Napoleon
@DougJ®:
It was anti-war in so far as the facts were anti war, but still he never took a position.
I don’t raise it as a criticism of him, but as proof of how tilted the playing field was at that time against the anti-war position. Fallows never bent over back wards to support a politically popular position, he just kept his head down and wrote as accurate a factual piece as he could. That can not be said of many others, including some like Chris Matthews who in some venues would on occasion question the wisdom of the war.
Martin
Obama’s 2012 budget proposal visualized.
Essentially, every box that you can read (ie. that isn’t miniscule) is mandatory spending, with the exception of defense which is almost entirely discretionary. Tools on the left help you sort it out. (Nice HTML5 website, btw)
Rock
This thread is probably dead, but it hits something that always bothers me: advocating policy based on”conventional wisdom” rather than any empirical data.
In this case, it’s presumed that University faculty are virtually all liberal and conservatives should be better represented. In actuality, the political makeup of a university or college is much more complicated. I imagine there’s a big split in general between art/humanities, science, business, and applied science (e.g. engineering) with the later fields having a bunch of conservatives. I won’t go further so as to avoid the sin I complain of, but the point is that I’d like to a phenomenon proven to be real before anyone starts talking about how to address it.
And, of course, I presume this is all a “let’s eat the poor” satirical stunt by McMegan to point out the evils of AA as opposed to merit hiring. If it’s not, it’s a ludicrous position to advocate for a professed conservative (who would favor merit, oppose government mandates on private colleges, should presume that in science there are only facts not conservative facts and liberal facts). The latter idea, that “liberal science” is bad leads down the trail to Godwin-like reference to a certain governments view of relativity but that would lead one to discuss if fascism is an adequately represented position at the Atlantic which is certainly beyond the pale.
DougJ®
@Napoleon:
I was very impressed by Matthews’ opposition. He’s a nut but he gets credit for that.
Ailuridae
@freelancer:
Oh, sorry. It was a genuine compliment.
Martin
@Ailuridae:
And this is a very easy problem to defend one side or the other because it’s exceedingly regional. If you have an area with strong physician groups (like parts of Texas) you can see imaging rates that are 5x the national average and 25x what you’ll find in areas where the doctors don’t get any kickback from those services. So depending on where you look, it’s either a massive problem, or no problem at all – and that holds true even within states.
kth`
Of course McArdle would be the last to accept the statistical fact of fewer African-Americans in this or that profession as evidence of discrimination or even some problem. She’d argue that either they eschew those professions, or they don’t have what it takes.
So she’s really just playing a gotcha game here. You believe that disparate numbers imply discrimination when it’s a matter of race, how can you not believe it in the case of ideology?. Remember that, she’s utterly insincere in arguing that statistical disparities reflect structural discrimination.
freelancer
@kdaug:
K, didn’t know if Alluridae was going for “You always sound retarded and immature”, and I’ll be the first one to cop to willful immaturity. Life is shit wall-to-wall if you can’t find the Silly. What’s funny is I learned a big part of that from this community.
Martin
@Rock:
Well, the main problem is that the reason it’s called ‘conventional wisdom’ because it’s wrong. People don’t realize that. They think ‘conventional wisdom’ means ‘commonly accepted facts’ not ‘shit we’ve proven is wrong, but people won’t give up on because they’re fucknuts’
Somehow that message needs to get through.
John Emerson
There’s gotta be a name for false truisms, because there are so many of them. But I can’t think of it.
dand
You know what they say about wrestling pigs in muck – everyone gets dirty but the pig enjoys it.
David Margolies
@hilts: Jeez, he was 19. I forgive people a lot for things they did when under 20.
Janus Daniels
@John Emerson: factoids?
Ailuridae
@Martin:
I’m more talking about going into the ER to get stitched up after falling and slicing your head and having the attending physician insist you need a CAT scan. That happens a whole lot regardless of how often doctors claim they never do it. It’s human nature – put easy money from an entity (an insurance company) in from of someone (a doctor) who feels consistently wronged by that entity and they are going to do things like run unnecessary tests etc. I have libertarian leaning doctor friends who pretty openly admit this is the case. It is basically offensive medicine.
freelancer
@Ailuridae:
No worries. Great, and now I’m hearing “ONE OF US! ONE OF US! ONE OF…”. This solidarity is making me feel lost. Quick, Mac vs PC fight!
Violet
@Ailuridae:
Except the one time they don’t order the CAT scan and the patient ends up having a problem that could have been diagnosed via CAT scan and the doctor/hospital/ER gets sued. That’s also what drives doctors to order tests that probably aren’t necessary, but are seen as necessary in a CYA sense.
Ailuridae
@Pooh:
responded.
Ailuridae
@Violet:
Yep and they always have that nonsense to fall back on. Doctors are about the only faction of society otherwise right-minded people ascribe only good motives to despite ample evidence to the contrary.
Look I am willing to make this bargain with doctors anytime they want. America pays for your med school, you get paid at VA rates and you get sovereign immunity from malpratice suits. We know doctors want no part of that – it is why the VA has such a brutal time filling positions.
Villago Delenda Est
@David Margolies:
If you were a Republican, you’d know that the statute of limitations on “youthful indiscretion” extends until you’re 45 or so. Just ask Henry Hyde.
Villago Delenda Est
@Violet:
Well, unless, of course, the doctor has a financial interest in the facility that provides the CAT scan.
Then the test is more than just CYA. It has the additional incentive of FMW*.
*Fill my wallet.
Ailuridae
@Villago Delenda Est:
A good friend is a pathologist and his hospital went to a fee for service model at the start of the year. Neither of us were surprised with the results – doctors enriching themselves by ordering more tests (and enriching themselves in the process)
NobodySpecial
I’ll take statistical equality of punditry. I want people who supported the Iraq War fired and people who opposed it hired until we get to 50/50. Then McMegan and Co. can go do blog posts from the fucking bread lines.
bemused
I don’t know whether to be impressed or aghast that anyone can read a Megan post all the way through without a massive headache. ‘Round and ’round she goes, when she’ll ever stop, nobody knows.
Southern Beale
You know, if we had a stronger safety net and people didn’t need to sue to get their needs met, we wouldn’t have such a big lawsuit problem in this country.
gnomedad
@CaptainFwiffo:
Quiet! You’ll give the wingers ideas!
matoko_chan
@John Cole: dont you believe in redemption?
Here is how you do it.
Have someone make a front page post on Salam-Douthat stratification on cognitive ability.
Make McMegan read Grand New Party.
timb
@Rob: God, I HATED that guy
joel hanes
@John Emerson:
The word for contra-factual common knowledge is “myth”
People whose common knowledge is predominantly contra-factual are properly known as “Bozos”.
by their nose-os, from the Spanish “vos otros”, the ‘b’ and the ‘v’ being the same
That’s why we call him Myth McConnell — everything he knows is wrong.
arguingwithsignposts
I realize this thread is probably dead, but I just have to say that McArgleBargle has no worries about any bias in academia because her shit output at the Atlantic isn’t worth the pixels, and she has no worries about being excluded. Her calculatorial war crimes do her in on their own merits.
RSA
@Rock:
It’s also the case that McMegan is very cavalier with her statistics. She writes, for example, that “In the professorship as a whole, the breakdown seems to be about 80% liberal-to-center-left, 20% everything else, which is still a remarkable skew.” I haven’t found any surveys that show this. 80% is the upper bound for some specific areas, even if it rises above 80% at elite schools.
What I want to know is a plausible mechanism that explains why engineering and science faculty are more than 50% liberal.
El Cid
Other than simply having to address someone whose idiocy is promoted in several national media, I have no idea why anyone would pay attention to any argument by McAddled — particularly not one having to do with how academia should be structured.
liberal
@RSA:
Is it really true that engineering faculty are pretty liberal? I didn’t think that was the case.
liberal
@Ailuridae:
Nah. No such thing as free market solutions to the problems. Too many big market failures.
Redshirt
@RSA: Pshaw. 72% of people know that 60% of all statistics are wrong or misleading 33% of the time.
liberal
@timb:
Yeah, for those of us who despised him, his fate was just.
Josh
IN 2002-3, TNC’s home was not The Atlantic but the Village Voice, no? I don’t think he expressed an opinion there on the war.
RSA
@liberal:
I was looking at this 2005 survey, which the WP summarizes in part by “But liberals outnumbered conservatives even among engineering faculty (51 percent to 19 percent) and business faculty (49 percent to 39 percent).” It surprised me, too.
DougJ®
@RSA:
It’s not as surprising as you think. I work with engineering professors and they are similar to other science professors. Engineering is essentially a science. And science is, almost by definition, a liberal undertaking.
Elia
Has anyone here ever emailed Ta-Nehisi?
Tax Analyst
@freelancer:
Remember:
Aging is mandatory.
Maturity is optional.
DougJ®
@Elia:
Yes, he’s good about answering, though not from me anymore since he caught me writing about what a circle jerk I think the Atlantic is.
DougJ®
@Josh:
I asked him and he didn’t reply.
matoko_chan
@DougJ®: shit. why dont you retards fight back?
BECAUSE IT TISNT FUCKING POLITE?
conservatism is selection for STUPID.
Salam-Douthat stratification on cognitive ability PROVES IT.
pussies.
matoko_chan
@Elia: ta-nehisi sukks ross douthat’s cock.
matoko_chan
@Elia: atlantic mafia dontcha knooooooo.
Barry
@Rob: Yeah, but he’s at least dead.
matoko_chan
@John Cole:
wimp.
ur a bigger pussy than Sully.
matoko_chan
oh great. moderation,
how can i be the grrl Matt Taibbi when you wont fucking let meh swear?
Elia
@DougJ®: I emailed him after meeting him, and it’s been months. Did he see me hanging out with the Balloon-Juice kids?
DougJ®
@Elia:
Maybe he’s just hit or miss about replying.
salvador dalai llama
I just left the following comment over at McArdle’s blog, but I think what I found by actually following one of her links would be valuable to the discussion:
—–
Megan: I think your taxonomy of bias is a good one. I get uncomfortable, though, when you conflate information that comes from a wide variety of sources.
Haidt: whose study does align with your thesis that groupthink can be bad–but he only uses informal methods to get his numbers–a show of hands at a meeting, an email survey sent to 30 social psychologists.
The Gross and Simmons article on political leanings and professors: This version is a working paper, and thus not a final, peer-reviewed article. They make an interesting claim:
This seems to complicate the liberal/conservative dynamic you focus on in your comments. There are as many centrists as liberals, and the profession is becoming more moderate overall. Hm. And then there’s this table:
This doesn’t seem to be quite the story that you tell with the other numbers. Liberals do outnumber conservatives, but moderates outnumber liberals. Does academia have an unhealthy bias toward moderation?
(The table didn’t reproduce well–go to the original article PDF and find it on p. 28).
matoko_chan
@Elia: ta-nehisi sukks dave weigel’s cock too. Coates is the just black andrew sullivan.
matoko_chan
@salvador dalai llama:
no…..this is Salam-Douthat stratification in action.
Conservatism has become memetic selection for Stupid.
Scamp Dog
@kdaug: He’s still “conservative” on economics, the debt, etc. The thing to remember about Andrew is that he’s a polemicist. His thing is to come up with a good argument for whatever he supports.
When it’s torture, he can come up with all kinds of good sources and use excellent reasoning.
When it’s nonsense like much of the conservative economics he favors, he’ll come up with fake facts from the wingnut-o-sphere, specious reasoning, straw men, whatever it takes.
How he figures out what he supports, I don’t know.
matoko_chan
@salvador dalai llama: so actually academe has a HEALTHY bias towards smart people.
matoko_chan
@Scamp Dog: Sully is a conservative shill that does nonaltruistic head fakes towards Palin truthiness and gay rights.
He still believes in catholicism, Oakeshott, and reasonable conservatives.
Joel
@salvador dalai llama: nice legwork. confirms my own experience, that’s for sure.
I weighed in on ‘cardles first post on the subejct and she (and her supporters) declined to comment. So I’m not going to bother giving her more eyeballs, which just about explains her incentive for pursuing this canard.
Gus diZerega
@John Cole:
But unlike most of them you are honest in admitting error and not then continuing on as if nothing had happened. That’s one reason I read you. Truth matters.
matoko_chan
@Elia:
possible.
TNC banned me for talking smack about Douchebag and Wiggle.
they are buds.
Ta-nehisi nah liek meh.
matoko_chan
here’s my favorite Jay Rosen. on backfire effect in conservatives, where he gives a smackdown to that pud Lehrer..
Lena Lamont
Gee, this is dumb.
matoko_chan
look. why cant someone call them on this? McMegan and Douchebag UNDERSTAND PERFECTLY WELL why 94% of scientists are not-republican and why elite students are fleeing the GOP like scalded cats. Who populates academe? Teaching research scientists and upper tailers in IQ and graduate students with TAs. The soi-disant conservative intelligentsia have written HUNDREDS of thousands of words thoughtfully musing about why this is happening.
THEY ALL KNOW WHY THIS IS HAPPENING.
Its right in Grand New Party page 154.
Salam-Douthat stratification on cognitive ability, or in laymen’s terms, redstate selection for stupid.
But it would be “rude” to rub those fuckers noses in it.
I’m sick of pretending there are “reasonable” people on the other side. There are stupid people on the other side, and dishonest people on the other side.
and that is all.