Category: Megan McArdle

‘People Who Are Joined in Collective Hate’

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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 as evil. . . .
Shame is one way we enforced good behavior in small groups before there were laws or trading networks. It is a very powerful motivator, and it helps us to come together in large cooperative groups with high degrees of trust and sharing. A hatred of being shamed ourselves and a love of shaming others who have transgressed both literally helped to make us human. . . .

Interrupting here (because I’m a mansplaining misogynist and that’s what we do) to point out that McArdle has correctly situated this in the context of mankind’s tribal nature. It cannot be emphasized enough that our need to feel membership in a larger group is a powerful psychological motivator. Even highly intelligent and well-educated people seldom stop to think why they identify so passionately as a sports fan (“Roll Tide!”) or in any other chosen tribal identity. Our social behavior — in everything from trivial things like online fanfic groups to international terrorist organizations — reflects our instinctive tribalism. And now, having exercised my patriarchal privilege, I yield the floor to Megan McArdle:

But . . . shame doesn’t just punish wrongdoers; it also turns us into our own moral enforcers. Once we’ve been shamed, we are strongly motivated to avoid doing the things that brought it on. Or at least, most of us are — one of the hallmarks of sociopaths is that they don’t feel shame or remorse. To paraphrase Gordon Gekko, shame is good. Shame is right. Shame works.

Interrupting again, because she’s wrong: Sociopaths do feel shame. They feel it very intensely. The problem is that their damaged ego has erected psychological defense mechanisms that involve the evasion of responsibility through the externalization of blame. Sociopaths rationalize their feelings of shame, lash out at anyone who makes them feel bad about their guilty secrets, and try to play the victim. (“DARVO — Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.”) Understanding this aspect of sociopathic behavior was what enabled me to unlock the riddle of Brett Kimberlin. One you understood Kimberlin’s shameful motive, everything else about his hideous behavior made a lot more sense. And, yes: Shame is good. Shame is right. Shame works. We return to Megan McArdle:

In the small groups we evolved to live in, shame is tempered by love and forgiveness. People are shamed for some transgression, then they are restored to the group. Ultimately, the shamed person is not an enemy; he or she is someone you need and want to get along with. This is how you make up with your spouse after one or both of you has done or said something terrible. . . .

Except, of course, (a) tribal societies shun or murder those who offend their basic code or honor, and (b) many marriages end because people cannot forgive their spouse’s transgressions. Folks, I apologize for my repeated interruptions. I agree with Megan McArdle. I like Megan McArdle. I want her to like me. So why do I keep interrupting her to make all these niggling little points? But never mind. This is not about my glaring personality defects. Megan McArdle continues:

On the Internet, when all the social context is stripped away and you don’t even have to look at the face of the person you’re being mean to, shame loses its social, restorative function. Shame-storming isn’t punishment. It’s a weapon. . . .
Outrages are identified using the least charitable, most literal possible reading of what someone wrote or did, rather than trying . . . to think of what they could have meant by it, giving them the benefit of the doubt where two readings are possible. Things that were stupid and thoughtless are turned into deliberate outrages that could only be the work of hardened psychopaths. . .
But forget whether the shaming is excessive. Does it even work?
To be sure, a lot of folks certainly seem terrified by the possibility of being attacked by roving bands of verbal vigilantes. Yet I notice two things about these fears that raise some questions about the tactic’s usefulness. First of all, the fears are strongest among people who are politically allied with the shame-stormers. And second, the people who are afraid don’t fear being found out for their dark transgressions; they fear being unjustly attacked.
Twitter makes it absurdly easy to shame someone. You barely have to take 30 seconds out of your day to make an outraged comment that will please your friends and hurt the person you’ve targeted. . . .
This sort of tactic may buy silence, though it is likely to be the most effective on people who already agree with you and simply said something infelicitous. What it cannot buy is community, beyond the bonds that build between people who are joined in collective hate.

You can and should read the whole thing. It was that phrase — “people who are joined in collective hate” — which caught my eye in McArdle’s piece, for this reason: Most conservatives cannot comprehend the intensity of hatred that motivates and unites the Left. Any attempt to out-hate them is futile. For example: No matter how much you hate Amanda Marcotte, you can never hate her as much as she hates you.

Amanda Marcotte exudes an all-encompassing hatred from every evil cell of her wicked anatomy. She is also compulsively dishonest, because a vile sadist like Marcotte fears nothing so much as she fears the exposure of her despicable hatefulness. Once you understand that, once you have unlocked the hidden shameful motive of Marcotte’s otherwise mystifying madness, everything else makes sense.

Like I say, “Scratch a feminist and a kook bleeds.”

Also, “Bad causes attract bad people.”

So I am grateful to Megan McArdle for her essay on shame-storming, and apologize again for my repeated interruptions. Nobody’s fault but mine.




 

A Long History Of Ineptitude And Corruption

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— 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 they do still have good reporters, they just don’t let them on the air) the VA has been a disastrous pile of fail ever since 1921, when Congress formed the Veterans Bureau only to see it collapse into a slough of corruption so bad that it had to be abolished in 1930 and replaced with the Veterans Administration, which also took over pensions from the Interior Department and the National Home For Disabled Veterans, this last actually comprising a number of Federally operated homes for destitute and disabled veterans.


Trouble could have been foreseen from the beginning at the VA, since its first head was retired Brigadier General Frank Hines, who had headed the scandal-plagued Veterans Bureau for seven years; he would be sacked by President Truman in 1945 after a series of news reports on shoddy care in VA hospitals*. He was replaced by General Omar Bradley, but even Bradley could make little headway with the over-centralized VA bureaucracy, and by 1946 the American Legion was calling for his head. Two years later, a government reform commission found massive waste, fraud and inefficiency in the VA, some of which was cured by decentralizing the bureaucracy; another reform commission in 1955 noted that waste and poor care persisted. The problems continued on through the 1970s, 80s, 90s, and continue to persist today.


Part of the problem is that while theoretically the VA is supposed to provide care for all veterans, in practice, it triages veterans based on whether their injuries/illnesses are combat-related (this was at the root of the Agent Orange brouhaha) and whether they can afford to pay for their own care. Another part of the problem is that the VA has arguably never had the assets to properly do its job, and while the VA budget has increased since 2008, it hasn’t kept up with the surge of elderly veterans from the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boom who now comprise most of the patient load. This is also the reason why you’re seeing most of the “dying in line” cases coming out of the VA medical centers in Arizona and Florida – those states are very attractive to retirees, and so retired vets tend to flock there. You don’t hear about problems like this in Minneapolis, Washington DC and Boston, for example, because most retired vets either aren’t interested in living in climatic hellholes or simply can’t afford to live in the latter two areas due to their high costs of living. The number of Iraq/Afghanistan vets trying to fight their way through the paperwork to get their benefits is relatively small by comparison.


Megan McArdle posted a pessimistic essay yesterday which I linked to this morning, whose basic thrust is that the Obama Administration thought they could solve the VA’s ongoing problems by just throwing more money at the problem and hiring some more people, only to find that the solution just wasn’t that simple – people need to be fired and processes need to be changed, and both of these are a hell of a lot harder in the Federal government than they are on Wall Street or Silicon Valley. Instead, thanks to the executive decision to make it easier for vets to get help for PTSD and Agent Orange, the claims ratcheted up faster than the agency could deal with them (McArdle quotes a National Journal article that says Agent Orange claims ate up 37% of the VA’s claims processing resources from 2010 to 2012), so things wound up even worse off than they were before. The obvious solution, which is allowing the private sector to take some of the load off, has been fought by the American Federation of Government Employees, which has been fighting a new $9.3 billion program that encourages Medicare-eligible vets (about half the patient population) to seek care from civilian hospitals.**
Stacy’s Crazy Cousin John is often wrong, but as far as the VA is concerned, he’s right – the Veterans Health Administration needs to be stripped down to the things it does best, and hand off other medical care to private physicians. Given the current administration’s sinister ineptitude, though, I think we’ll continue seeing more veterans die in line while waiting for the VA bureaucracy to get them what they need.


*In an ironic tribute to the VA’s ongoing problems, the Chicago VA Medical Center is named for General Hines and is equally mired in scandal.
** Hat tip to The Lonely Conservative.


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The Shocking (But Actually Predictable) Stupidity of ObamaCare Bureaucrats

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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 competent to be trusted with the implementation of such a thing?

Here’s one quote from McArdle’s summary:

The memo [from David Cutler to Larry Summers in September 2010] is eerily prophetic: The key people were analysts with no experience in project management, technology, startups or the insurance business; responsibility was too diffused; the staff didn’t understand either the magnitude or the urgency of what they had taken on; and neither the Department of Health and Human Services nor the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, to which most of the job had been delegated, had the personnel or technical experience to manage it well. The job of shepherding the project was given to Nancy-Ann Min DeParle, the director of the White House Office of Health Reform and a very wonky wonk who happens to be married to one of my favorite writers. According to one official, the president believed that “if you were to design a person in the lab to implement health care, it would be Nancy-Ann.”

Uh, a history major with a Harvard Law degree? Look, I understand Obama has profound faith in the miraculous powers of Harvard Law graduates — he is supremely confident in his own transcendent genius — but why Nancy-Ann? Because she worked three years in the Clinton-era HHS? And another quote from McArdle:

[M]any of the bad decisions were designed to avoid Republican criticism. There was another reason that the exchanges’ architects were tucked away inside CMS: to try to stay out of the public eye. Other such decisions followed. CMS carefully obscured the unwillingness of a large number of states to build exchanges — despite the fact that this would greatly increase the complexity of the job — lest Republicans seize on that fact.

Was avoiding scrutiny — preventing Republicans from finding out what was going on — a policy decision or a political decision? And if politics was behind decision-making in what should have been a policy-oriented project, doesn’t this tell us something crucial?

Ah, but guess what? I still haven’t gotten to the quote that caused Ace to issue the “Flaming Skull” alert. Yes, it is that bad.

 

Liberal Media Bias and Self-Selection

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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 deluding themselves. Paul Weyrich explained this in 1999, and yet you occasionally hear conservatives talk about the need to “take back our schools.” To this, my answer is two-fold:

  1. What do you mean, “our schools”? They’re the government’s schools, not our schools, and if you still think the government is “us,” you need to seek psychiatric help immediately.
  2. With whom do you propose to “take back” the schools? Where do you plan to find the conservative teachers and principals and superintendents and textbook writers with whom to replace the liberals who now dominate those positions within the system? What colleges of education will train these conservative teachers, and what agencies will credential them?

That is to say, the reason we do not have conservative public schools is because the people who run the schools are not conservative.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

It’s a problem of personnel, and the idiots babbling about “taking back” the schools never have any proposal to solve the actual problem, which is that liberals enjoy teaching school, whereas conservatives prefer private-sector jobs where they can make money.

Something quite similar is true in regard to the problem of liberal bias in the media. Journalism is the only career field typically requiring a college diploma in which the average salary is lower than the average salary of school teachers. People talk about the “media elite” as if the average reporter was making network TV megabucks, when in fact most journalists earn less than a long-haul trucker.

Conservatives don’t become journalists because most conservatives are smart enough to pay attention to their high-school guidance counselors who advise any student who will listen to stay the hell away from this miserable low-paying racket. (My excuse? I was stoned most of the time in high school, and stayed drunk  half the time in college, besides which, I was a Democrat back then anyway.) So young conservatives generally don’t become reporters, and instead go to law school or get MBAs or do something else where they might actually hope to make a living. And liberals become journalists because they want to Make a Difference and Change the World.

So the Koch Brothers are reportedly thinking about buying the Los Angeles Times, liberals are predictably having hissy fits about it, and Megan McArdle wrote about it at The Daily Beast:

Garance Franke-Ruta, writes that the Kochs effort is doomed. Newspapers are liberal because their audience is liberal, she says.  And they’re staffed by the people who live in cities, who are also liberal.

Well, the woman whom Ace calls “Something Faranze-Gupta or whatever” may be right about most of that. With the education system in the iron grip of  liberals (which we’ve already demonstrated), it is probably true that the mass readership is also largely liberal. And no one can doubt that major cities like New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., are crammed full of liberals.

Ask yourself this: Why don’t conservatives live in cities?

Answer: Because conservatives want to get married and have children, and cities are horrible places to raise children.

This is why cities are occupied by single people, gay people and poor people who can’t afford to move to the suburbs. All of these demographic groups are reliable constituencies of the Democratic Party — as are journalists, about 90 percent of whom would never vote for a Republican under any circumstances whatsoever.

As in most situations involving what social scientists call “selection effects,” there is a complex causation issue at work, and once any institution becomes truly dominated by liberalism, it’s difficult to say how much of this dominance is natural and organic, and how much of it is the result of conservatives getting blackballed or other forms of deliberate viewpoint discrimination.

Obviously, both factors are at work to some extent, but the point I’m trying to make is that the hegemony of liberalism in journalism — as in academia and in Hollywood — is so complete that it’s probably useless to argue about it. And the liberals who are worrying themselves sick about the Koch brothers buying the L.A. Times can relax, because the Kochs couldn’t possibly find enough conservative newspaper editors and reporters in the entire state of California with which to staff the paper.

Notice something, incidentally: Ace of Spades links and quotes Megan McArdle, but Megan McArdle — who links and quotes her former Atlantic colleague “Something Faranze-Gupta or whatever” — never links and quotes Ace.

Why is Megan link-starving Ace? And it’s not just Ace, either. I’ve noticed this for years about Megan: Although a professed libertarian, and a frequent recipient of linky-love from the Right side of the Web, she’s never linked any conservative blogger, as far as I can recall.

Don’t know what it means, but I do notice things like that.

UPDATE: It is important, I think, to distinguish between (a) liberal bias, and (b) journalism per se. A few years ago, I risked angering Melissa Clouthier to make that point: Some conservatives have spent so many years complaining about The Media that their rhetoric is no longer aimed at unfair political bias and instead seems to be an expression of hostility toward an entire profession. If “journalism” is considered a dirty word among conservatives, we should scarcely be surprised that “conservative” is considered a dirty word among journalists.

“I hate you back twice as much” may be an emotionally satisfying response to prejudice, but it is unlikely to remedy the problem.

 

Was That Megan McArdle Or Meghan McCain?

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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 Waters; Howdy Doody: when are we going to face the systemic problem? If I have an incompetent, unethical piece of work against whom I cannot vote lining a wallet via their corruption, this is almost as horrible as old-fashioned taxation without representation!

And I speak as someone living in VA-8. I’m not ashamed of my country, let me tell you, but I do feel twinges of embarrassment over my Congressional district, when our economic playing field is so tilted by a piece of work like ‘Gentleman’ Jim Moran. The notion that ‘at least Jim Moran isn’t Nancy Pelosi warms me not.

There is absolutely no apologizing for this pack of louts.

The Politics of Nostalgia

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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 the extent that I have anything to add, it is this: Blame LBJ.

In his effort to create “The Great Society,” Lyndon Johnson’s  policies ended up destroying a Pretty Good Society.

Say whatever you want about our problems today, or advocate whatever “solutions” you wish, but there can be no dispute that Johnson’s presidency was the Era of Error, the historic wrong turn from which we’ve spent nearly half a century trying to recover. That Johnson was himself a liberal, attempting to live up to the historic legend of his own youthful idol FDR, ought to tell us something — but it’s something Krugman probably doesn’t want to think too much about.

This all came to my attention, by the way, because Little Miss Attila sent me her post, which linked Megan McArdle, who linked Manzi.

I was briefly tempted to argue with Attila, but life is too short.

Note to Self: Never Link Xconomy.com

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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 neither the source site nor the writer who conducted the interview.

Bad Megan! Bad, bad Megan!

However, it subsequently became apparent that Xconomy is a site run by obnoxious douchebags:

I won’t disclose the contents of our correspondence, since the editor who emailed me has requested that they remain confidential. I think I may disclose that they are very upset about what they see as an egregious fair use violation. I attempted to rectify the situation by trimming down the excerpts, and naming the site from which they were drawn, but this seems to have somehow only made them madder — perhaps because this is so rare in my ten years of experience blogging that I was mystified rather than sufficiently apologetic.  But of course I support their right to control lengthy dissemination of their work, so I have taken down the offending post.

Look: Nothing wrong with a publisher enforcing his intellectual property rights, but it isn’t good business for a publisher to act like a complete douchebag toward bloggers.

In point of fact, my excerpt of Megan’s post amounts to more than a third of its content, so if her editors at the Atlantic wanted to be total douchebags, they could start filling my inbox with huffy e-mails threatening me with legal action. But they don’t do that because, even though their traffic is way bigger than mine, getting linked by bloggers is good for their business.

Megan McArdle is a nice person who has good-naturedly put up with a lot of joshing from me over the years and seldom complained, not even when — after her engagement to Peter Suderman — I dubbed her “my favorite acromegalic bride-to-be.” Megan knew that I was just trying to needle her enough to get a link and, imperious giantess that she is, she refused to lash out in anger.

That would be beneath her — as, of course, most things are beneath someone who’s nine feet tall.

Perhaps I exaggerate. Still, it is a mark of her graciousness that Megan hasn’t crushed me beneath one of her enormous feet, and anyone who is mean to her is therefore my enemy.

Xconomy.com now has a spot on my (very short) no-link list.

Because They’re Better Than You

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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 professor
•Education erases false conservative ideas and turns people into liberals
•Conservatives don’t want to be professors because they’re more interested in something else (money, the military)
•Conservatives don’t want to be professors because they’re anti-intellectual
•Conservatives hold false beliefs that make them ineligible to be professors

Notice that none of these explanations reflect disfavorably on academia or liberals. Whatever the causes of liberal bias in academia, in other words, neither liberalism as a philosophy nor the university system as an institution can be held responsible. The blame must be externalized onto conservative scapegoats.

These explanations tell us a great deal about the liberal worldview, but nothing we didn’t already know.