The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘People Who Are Joined in Collective Hate’

Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) has a smart take on Ron Jonson’s book about social-media shaming: If I have one complaint about the book, it’s that he doesn’t dive deep enough into what shaming is good for and why we like it so much. . . . Shame is, after all, a force for good as well […]

A Long History Of Ineptitude And Corruption

— Wombat-socho While this could be a descriptor of many offices, bureaux, agencies and possibly even entire departments of the Federal Government, I’m addressing the problems at the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is still referred to by many as the Veterans Administration or simply VA. As CNN points out in this excellent article (apparently […]

The Shocking (But Actually Predictable) Stupidity of ObamaCare Bureaucrats

Ace of Spades gave the “Flaming Skull” alert to a quote from a Washington Post article about the ObamaCare botch that had been included in a summary by Megan McArdle at Bloomberg. On Twitter last night, Ace seemed genuinely astonished by this. But really, who had any illusions that a bunch of liberal bureaucrats were […]

Liberal Media Bias and Self-Selection

C’mon, @aceofspadeshq: “Something Faranze-Gupta or whatever”?@thegarance is no Max Blumenwhatever! minx.cc/?post=339613 — Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) May 1, 2013 Some years ago — when our daughter, now 23, was in kindergarten, to be specific — I gave up on the public school system. It’s doomed beyond all hope of redemption, and conservatives who think otherwise are […]

Was That Megan McArdle Or Meghan McCain?

by Smitty Nonetheless, I confess, I like Barney Frank. I also think that, whatever his mistakes, he’s pretty knowledgeable about finance. And you need only look at the committee list to see that it could have been so, so much worse. Well, garsh, guys: the leukemia death was way better than straight decapitation. Barney Frank; Maxine […]

The Politics of Nostalgia

It turns out that “progress” involves a giant leap backward for a lot of progressives, including Paul Krugman. This is the burden of Jim Manzi’s observations about Krugman’s nostalgia for the lost Golden Age of the 1950s and ’60s: It is Krugman’s idealized childhood that is the true destination of his allegedly progressive longings. To […]

Note to Self: Never Link Xconomy.com

Megan McArdle at the (soon-to-be-Sully-free) Atlantic linked and excerpted an interview that Xconomy.com did with a venture capitalist, Ken Kinsella. The World’s Tallest Female Blogger admits that her excerpting — more than a third of a 2,100-word article — was way over the “fair use” line and, while she included a link to the article, she named […]

Because They’re Better Than You

Megan McArdle did a post about evidence that academia systematically excludes conservatives. Liberals responded by justfying and/or defending this exclusion, offering a variety of excuses which Megan summarizes thus: •Smart people are almost always liberal •Curiosity and interest in ideas is a liberal trait •Conservatives are too rigid and authoritarian to maintain the open mind required of a […]