Compulsive Contrarian Disorder
mikethemadbiologist | January 10, 2011The NY Times' Matt Bai writes a predictable article about the Gifford shooting:
Within minutes of the first reports Saturday that Representative Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, and a score of people with her had been shot in Tucson, pages began disappearing from the Web. One was Sarah Palin's infamous "cross hairs" map from last year, which showed a series of contested Congressional districts, including Ms. Giffords's, with gun targets trained on them. Another was from Daily Kos, the liberal blog, where one of the congresswoman's apparently liberal constituents declared her "dead to…
mikethemadbiologist | December 22, 2010Democrats need a better class of pundits, ones who aren't so enamored of their own cleverness, while at the same time, utterly ignorant of political history. It would help, for instance, when trying to defend the estate tax. Matthew Yglesias, in a fit of contrarianism worthy of William Saletan, asks the following scintillating question:
I think if I read another snatch of writing where a progressive puzzles over why the estate tax is unpopular, I'm going to shoot myself. More informative, I think, would be self-examination. Why are liberals eager to tax estates. My own effort to think this…
mikethemadbiologist | December 5, 2009Wherein the Mad Biologist indulges in Compulsive Contrarian Disorder. There's been a lot of talk about the National Football League's new rules about concussions, which force a player to stay out of a game during which he received a concussion. On the one hand, this absolutely is the right thing to do: brain trauma ain't cool.
On the other hand, I think this might increase the attempts to knock players unconscious. If you know that 'ringing a player's bell' will get him tossed from the game, it's open season on star players, especially on those players who have had concussions before. '…