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Megan McArdle Profile picture
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2 Dec, 4 tweets, 1 min read
I'm back to writing almost exclusively about the pandemic, often with no very obvious political valence--how to think about testing, what sorts of things might change as a result.

One thing I've noticed is that many readers get really angry when I *don't* make it political.
It's like they cannot conceive of ever wanting to write about the pandemic through any other lens except Donald Trump's failures (Which are many! I have written about them!) They interpret any attempt to speak about anything else as some sort of crude attempt to evade The Truth.
It's really weird.
And I kind of wonder what these people are going to do when Donald Trump leaves office and they can no longer spend a significant chunk of every day getting mad at him.

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More from @asymmetricinfo

Megan McArdle Profile picture
25 Nov
The last nine months should have demonstrated that there's a lot of ruin left in our nation. If China cut off our supply, electronics would be scarce and expensive for a while, and then we'd build chip fabs here. We would not turn into Argentina.
There are plenty of ways America could enter permanent decline. "Can't figure out how to domestically manufacture semiconductors" seems very unlikely to be among them.
To expand on this thought: this is kind of a variant on what that Japanese managed in WWII, getting their hands on pretty much the entire global rubber supply. (Fun fact: we rationed gasoline less because it was scarce than because TIRES were scarce & rationing gas reduced wear)
Read 4 tweets
Megan McArdle Profile picture
24 Nov
I didn't like Hillbilly Elegy, the Movie nearly as much as the book. However: I watched it right after Queen's Gambit. And while QG is objectively better written/styled, I found myself thinking about it a lot, while QG dissolved like the cotton candy it is.
I've been wondering why that is. Part of it, undoubtedly, is that HE had the same struggle as all memoirs: real lives don't have clear plots. (Or rather they have too much; Howard struggled to pick out one clean thread.) But the people felt real, particularly Close/Adams.
QG, by contrast, was a superficial gloss that scrubbed away all the actual deep struggles of being neuroatypical and turned the protagonist into a too-pretty Mary Sue whom everyone leaps to help despite the fact that she's kind of miserable to be around.
Read 5 tweets
Megan McArdle Profile picture
20 Nov
Confronted with the past remarks of Clinton and Abrams, large portions of lefty twitter have started insisted that Trump's major violation is the lawsuit--which is the most normal, acceptable thing he is doing. It's his extrajudicial activities that are unprecedented and horrific
The problem is not that Trump is going to court. The problem is that he is stating, as a fact, that a vast electoral fraud occurred in order to avoid admitting he lost the election by the rules then in place for holding the election.
(And also that this vast electoral fraud did not occur, or if we want to go all "You can't prove a negative", that he has offered no good evidence it did.)

The duty to concede is separate from the structure of the system, in a way too few people seem to be appreciating.
Read 4 tweets
Megan McArdle Profile picture
19 Nov
So Democrats are going to be tempted to be quiet about the prior antics of Hillary Clinton and Stacey Abrams, on the (absolutely true) grounds that what Trump is doing is so much worse, and how dare you take the focus off him?

Understandable instinct, but a disastrous mistake.
The correct move here, both politically and ethically, is to utterly repudiate those earlier, dangerous flirtations with refusing to accept the legitimacy of a democratic election, and do your best to force the perpetrators to do so as well.
Undercut the best rejoinder Republicans have, which is that Democrats don't care about the norms of democratic legitimacy, and will hypocritically tolerate abuses from their own side.
Read 5 tweets
Megan McArdle Profile picture
17 Nov
So I'm advising people to skip the big Thanksgiving, even though yes, most people who go to a big family Thanksgiving dinner will not die! washingtonpost.com/opinions/my-no…
I think it's worth talking about how I came to that conclusion, even though I understand that turkey day is super important to a whole lot of people.
Basically, it boiled down to: when I described a "safe" dinner, everyone asked "But then, what's the point?"

People don't want to wave at their relatives from a comfortably distanced chair on the driveway while eating the food they brought in their own cooler.
Read 25 tweets
Megan McArdle Profile picture
16 Nov
Greenwald, Sullivan and Yglesias got so big by starting blogs that they could sell to traditional publications. They are not monetizing an audience they acquired through larger institutions, but reclaiming one they created themselves. pllqt.it/lJGvqe
That's from this CJR piece, btw:

cjr.org/special_report…

Maybe being a white dude advantages you in blogging, though I did all right. But my observation as someone who did it is that the qualities that make you a great blogger are much, much more specific.
Basically, absolutely voracious information consumption, very fast reaction time, the ability to write quickly and coherently, the ability to cover a broad range of topics, and the ability to keep it up over weeks, months, years. Most people--even most writers--just can't do it.
Read 8 tweets

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