I gotta hand it to FOARP, even when he is on the road, he still is on the job.
I just am not able to spend much time fact-checking (or even reading) Megan McArdle. The nonsense is just too deep for me to penetrate, and too irritating to bother trying, and of course as has been well documented, she is always light on any sort of evidence for her claims and assumptions. That, indeed, is her MO.
Luckily, there are actually a bunch of bloggers who do so, and still others, while not writing about her, are right there, in the trenches, asking pertinent questions. That’s a movement, right there, I would say.
As I said, I rarely read her blog. As in, only when other people write about the horror of the moment going on over there, and especially if they write well. Go read Susan of Texas’ excellent piece on Megan’s convenient (and regular) assumptions, and you will see that Susan uses FOARP’s (and others’) comments from Megan’s piece to show how Megan simply dismisses any attempt to make her do the littlest bit of work. Susan concludes:
McArdle reserves the right to continue discussing anything that strikes her fancy, but she has moved on past the old, uncomfortable past into a shiny new future, where nobody remembers a word she said and everyone ignores the killing blows to her reputation and legitimacy.
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Poor James Fallows. With the exception of Ta-Nehisi Coates, look at who he is surrounded by: Andrew (fifth-column) Sullivan and his blood-soaked hands. Jeffrey Goldberg the neo-con Israeli-settlement backer (regularly skewered by the always-excellent Jonathan Schwarz), Mark Ambinder (who has been bludgeoned many times by Brad DeLong and others), Clive Crook, and Megan.
Somehow, I suspect some changes will be coming down the pipe pretty soon here. I sense a critical mass of understanding of just how unserious Megan McArdle really is.
Bonus Tigris comment with what will be a viral term:
I suspect that Holbo, and many of my interlocutors, are made intensely uncomfortable by the idea that their root assumption–that they are on the side of reducing human suffering and lengthening lifespans–might be wrong.
That is kind of majestic in its fallaciousness. Ad hominem, strawman, red herring… it’s a rad strawminem.