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QOTD: Where has Megan McArdle been for the past several years?

She writes on flash mobs:

7-11 flash mobs?  I dimly recalled seeing Rod Dreher blog about this happening in malls near his home.  Is this really a thing? Are we now sending half-a-dozen police cars to handle . . . teenagers armed with cell phones?

She describes an incident and then points out:

It’s maddeningly clever.  It’s hard to defend against dozens of teenagers descending on your store at once.  And even if the police catch someone, what are the odds that he can credibly name the hundred-odd teenagers who were also there?  For that matter, what are the odds that police want to expend a lot of investigative energy booking dozens of people on a petty shoplifting charge?

The violent flash mob is the cousin to another game called ‘Knockout King’ which Matt Yglesias got to play one night after leaving a house party at McArdle’s house.  Is she aware of that game, or do these people talk about anything other than monetary policy and tapas?

Contra many of this blog’s readers, I like McArdle if only because she’s the least prone to progressive preening out of all of her prestige press partners.  But is she an outlier, or is she the norm in not knowing about this widely discussed trend?

And then the next question – if journalists stumble upon this trend en masse will they mention the unmentionable?

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40 Responses to QOTD: Where has Megan McArdle been for the past several years?

  1. Sal 02/26/2013 at 5:31 pm

    Teenagers? Yeah, “teenagers.” And a shame a few knocks to the head haven’t helped Yglesias learn anything.

  2. Davis 02/26/2013 at 6:37 pm

    You’d think when that girl from The Onion was stomped to the point of broken bones that the SWPL crowd would have noticed this phenomenon. The Onion chick was attacked in Philadelphia and Matty Y was punched in DC in an area I’m pretty familiar with..gentrifiers abutting to feral blacks.

  3. K(yle) 02/26/2013 at 7:20 pm

    So how many tens (hundreds?) of billions do we spend ever year following around, infiltrating, and otherwise harassing white teens and twenty something unarmed skins, who are collectively more law abiding than your typical “Teen”.

    Of course that’s all done under the auspices of the FBIs ‘anti-terror’ mandate post-9/11. There just isn’t any room in the budget or political will to engage in any kind of anti-terrorist activity that would actually result in people not living in terror.

    It’s maddeningly clever. It’s hard to defend against dozens of teenagers descending on your store at once.

    It’s not. You just open fire. Except it’s hard to defend against the inevitable legal charges for taking any action except being a passive victim and then quivering in fear over the media digging through your life (and life of people who happen to share your name) to find some justification to vindicate the perpetrators.

    It’s not hard to defend against except in the scenario in which defending against it is illegal, there is no effort to actual bring any of the perpetrators to justice, and even barring that “private” institutions that are richer and better run than the governments of European nations will bear down upon you for going off script.

    And even if the police catch someone, what are the odds that he can credibly name the hundred-odd teenagers who were also there?

    Is she retarded? If you get one person that won’t roll on the others you can charge that one person with the entirety of the crime. You can also throw the book at them on more than just petty theft, including Terrorist Enhancements (it’s not ridiculous; you can go to prison as a business owner for terrorist charges for boycotting Israeli businesses).

  4. DaveinHackensack 02/26/2013 at 7:40 pm

    McMegan acts as if this is some sort of insoluble problem. Deterring these flash mobs isn’t rocket science. All the cops need to do is run an occasional sting operation. Use social media to trigger a flash mob, and have the store that’s the target of the flash mob manned by plain clothes cops. When the miscreants start shoplifting, bar the doors and arrest every single one of them. No need for any investigation.

    Do that a few times and all of a sudden flash mobs will lose their allure. But to address a problem, you first have to acknowledge it exists.

  5. PA 02/26/2013 at 7:49 pm

    Gentrifiers like the Onion girl or Yglesias don’t notice the phenomenon for the same reason hunters on a safari don’t “hate” the charging rhino. The rhino is part of the proving ground and makes the place exciting and if you get gored, you blame yourself. See my long comment in the Hipsters and Nerds post.

    But unlike the rhino in the bush or the taunting macaques, the feral nigger is human and you eventually take the abuse personally. The day when whites who matter say fuck it and give up on blacks and find their moral reality elsewhere is going to come. One of the most powerful things uttered on the alt-right was Ferd Bardamu’s comment “Trayvon Martin is peak-negro.”

    Anyone remember the eighties and how much good will and fair in blacks there was in the zeitgeist? That was like another planet compared with today’s simmering hostility, or cynical apathy at best.

  6. Trouble 02/26/2013 at 7:57 pm

    What Onion girl?

  7. Days of Broken Arrows 02/26/2013 at 8:04 pm

    I don’t know what’s worse:

    Feminists acting like one man behaving badly in public should be a crime….or Megan McArdle thinking that when several hundred do it, it shouldn’t be.

  8. peterike 02/26/2013 at 8:40 pm

    Wow, that Gawker column on Onion girl sets a new record for media myopia.

    And teens being teens, they attacked everyone for no reason, including Guendelsberger, who was knocked down and had her leg broken.

    Just teens bein’ teens! Comments for the article? Closed after one innocuous comment. The Left fears nothing more than an open discussion of race.

  9. Reym 02/26/2013 at 9:09 pm

    Thing is, “Flash Mobs” have been around for quite some time as a SWPL hobby. When I think of a “Flash Mob” I think of something like this:

    [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwMj3PJDxuo&w=420&h=315%5D

    So the idea of Flash Mobs that go around and steal shit, attack people, and damage property is a little under the rader.

  10. Reym 02/26/2013 at 9:10 pm

    Ugh. Bad URL and a typo. And for some reason the comment box has shrunk. Not my day for commenting.

  11. C.R. 02/26/2013 at 10:13 pm

    Onion Girl is Emily Guendelsberger.

    I wrote about the incident after Paul Kersey brought it to attention:

    http://glpiggy.net/2011/06/27/a-v-club-editor-hurt-by-black-mob/

    Guendelsberger, who wrote for AV Club, also admitted later that she’d be “twitchy” around groups of young black males for a while.

    http://glpiggy.net/2011/07/06/emily-guendelsberger-admits-shell-be-twitchy-around-blacks/

  12. everybodyhatesscott 02/26/2013 at 11:15 pm

    I actually like McCardle too. She’s a little clueless but she’s a female Libertarian in a highly liberal DC and she seems to consider things from a neutral perspective. She’s not perfect by any means but definitely worth a read.

  13. Steve Johnson 02/27/2013 at 2:29 am

    Megan McCardle is no libertarian. She’s really a liberal who occasionally says things like “hey, this policy is insane at getting to the goal advocated so let’s tweak it a bit”.

    It’s 2013 – if you still argue as if the stated goal of progressive policies means anything at all you’re either a liar or a fool.

    Megan lies because she likes her nice mainstream media job. She even almost got the NY Times designated fake conservative spot.

  14. monroe ficus 02/27/2013 at 9:39 am

    If they remake Death Wish, they should have a scene where a flash rob is stopped. PC Hollywood would make it a mutlicultural flash rob though. Not a “teen” one. Teen please!

  15. K(yle) 02/27/2013 at 9:57 am

    Megan McCardle is no libertarian. She’s really a liberal

    Libertarians are liberals.

  16. Steve Johnson 02/27/2013 at 11:39 am

    K(yle)

    Vox is a libertarian and is no liberal.

    I get the gist of what you’re saying but it glosses over some really useful distinctions.

  17. Obsidian Files 02/27/2013 at 12:53 pm

    Very interesting post, Chuck.

    I think McArdle’s cluelessness on the issue of flashmobs and the like only gives credence to you and others in the Alt-Rightsphere’s claims about just how out of touch many in the prestige press actually are. And by the way, I happen to like much of McArdle’s writing, too.

    Having said that however, I must ask – are flash mobs even relevant anymore? I mean, in the case of my hometown Philly, they haven’t been an issue since mayor Nutter put a stop to them going on what, two years ago? So, in a way, I am not quite sure I see your point in bringing this up.

    Lastly, what are journalists supposed to mention that everyone here and elsewhere doesn’t already know? Please explain?

    Thanks!

    O.

  18. PA 02/27/2013 at 1:52 pm

    “I am not quite sure I see your point in bringing this up.”

    There was this punk from Chicago who learned a tough lesson in not whistling at married women.

    We had to hear about it for sixty years.

  19. Alan B 02/27/2013 at 2:02 pm

    Flash mobs are only getting so much attention because of the videos of them floating around. Back in the mean old 80s, the “teens” used the term BUM RUSH. it was no different than flash mobs, other than there was no video evidence.
    “Teens” would bum rush everything.
    Bum rush the trains (50 “teens” jumping the turnstile ergo, not paying.)
    Bum rush that nigga over there (a bunch of “teens” attacking that nigga over there. prelude to the ever popular knockout kings game)
    Yo, Bum Rush the show (a bunch of “teens” rushing the door to an event/movie/venue. since everyone inside looks just like the “teens” rushing, you cant really catch/ID them)
    Ma Niggas, lets go bum rush Teamo. (Fellow group of “teens” i require free chips, soda, candy, and gum, let us go to the local indian store (teamo was the predecessor to 7-11 back in the day, mostly owned by indians) and acquire said goods for free)

    At least for anyone that’s ever witnessed a rush, there is NO QUESTION why you move to the other side of the street when you see more than 4 “teens” walking in a pack.
    For anyone that’s ever “twitched” at the sight of a pack of “teens” that’s exactly why there are extreme gun control laws in certain states. There would be ALOT more Bernie Geotz’ running around and alot LESS “Teen Mobs” with a valid 2nd amendment.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard_Goetz

  20. nikcrit 02/27/2013 at 2:11 pm

    Lastly, what are journalists supposed to mention that everyone here and elsewhere doesn’t already know?

    I read McArdle’s piece and I didn’t think it was evasive or particularly clueless; she is a bit late in how she cites flashmobs, but she readily admits it, and she then cites some backstory to compensate for that lack.

    In her analysis, she doesn’t make light of the trend, either; after that ‘bunch of teenagers’ remark, she notes that f-mobs can become insidiously problematic in that they’re hard to prosecute and she notes that it’s both a social and technological problem.

    to the other commenter re. swpl flashmobs: yeah, I recall in the early 2000s, flashmob incidents were almost always connected to cutting-edge SWPL cliques, e.g., avant-garde theater groups, art students, etc.

  21. nikcrit 02/27/2013 at 2:26 pm

    “But unlike the rhino in the bush or the taunting macaques, the feral nigger is human and you eventually take the abuse personally. The day when whites who matter say fuck it and give up on blacks and find their moral reality elsewhere is going to come”

    I’d bet those “whites who matter” have no idea they are such and their disenchantment with “mattering” has a lot to do with their seeking moral certitude via said ‘feral niggers.’
    The alt-right needs to empathize more with their wayward SWPL cousins —– NOT more conceited, self-serving analytical takedowns, but really try to get in the mind of a white, materially comfortable, status-holding professional who has liberal social and political views, and understand from a PERSONAL level why that might be.
    That may sound a bit condescending, but I really don’t see that from alt-right blogs; I see striver’s resentment thrown at SWPL’s, I see cariacture, I see other things too —– but I don’t see any existential empathy extended their way.

    it’s the will-o’-the-wisp of niggerization, the closer you get in your hunt for the’ feral nigger’, the more rapidly it fades away…..

  22. Camlost 02/27/2013 at 2:31 pm

    it’s the will-o’-the-wisp of niggerization, the closer you get in your hunt for the’ feral nigger’, the more rapidly it fades away…..

    No, “it” is moving down here to Atlanta in droves and can be found quite easily on any given day.

  23. nikcrit 02/27/2013 at 2:37 pm

    “(it’s not ridiculous; you can go to prison as a business owner for terrorist charges for boycotting Israeli businesses).”

    Details?

  24. nikcrit 02/27/2013 at 2:46 pm

    “No, “it” is moving down here to Atlanta in droves and can be found quite easily on any given day.”

    OT@Camlost: I have a real split feeling and history with the south; as a kid, I loved going down to Kentucky and Alabama, visiting my grandparents and other relatives —– I was young enough to not see what I didn’t want to, and I just loved the gloss of all that southern charm, manner and cooking; the big family feasts we’d have, etc.
    But by the time I was a teenager, I came to dread going down there; the heat…. i couldn’t stand to live in Atlanta or anywhere in the south, and I say that realizing that 90% of the people that comment here couldn’t as much as imagine living in Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota —– the only places, i’ve finally realized, where I’ll ever be fully comfortable.

  25. nikcrit 02/27/2013 at 2:49 pm

    @C.R.,
    my apologies for going off-topic and/or over-commenting….hey, it’s a snow-day here in the upper-midwest; no schoolo and too much time on my hands. lol!

  26. Sixpan 02/27/2013 at 2:51 pm

    nikcrit:

    I can’t speak for every other alt-right whitey, but I was steeped in the culture of white, materially comfortable, status-holding professionals who had liberal social and political views. We called it “school” where I come from, and it was liberally reinforced by television. The reason I don’t feel much existential empathy for the SWPL crowd is that their ideology is suicidal and they want to drag me along with them.

    And feral niggers are no will o’ wisp abstraction– the bogeyman is real. I’ve seen him. I’ve been to funerals because of him.

  27. Camlost 02/27/2013 at 3:07 pm

    W-O-T-W caught on camera:

  28. nikcrit 02/27/2013 at 3:47 pm

    “And feral niggers are no will o’ wisp abstraction– the bogeyman is real. I’ve seen him. I’ve been to funerals because of him.”

    Ditto: each school year I attend a few of students done in by said ;ferals’; I just prefer a bit less crude a term, but I do understand the attitude and frustration.

  29. peterike 02/27/2013 at 4:09 pm

    We called it “school” where I come from

    LOLz!

    And that was hella train ride up there. I’m certain — as a good Progressive Liberal with correct thinking — that a couple of white kids could step into that train car and not expect ANY trouble from that crowd, what with race being a social construct and black crime and dysfunction nothing more than a fraudulent manifestation of a bigoted white media and the prison-industrial complex.

  30. Obsidian Files 02/27/2013 at 6:39 pm

    @PA:
    “There was this punk from Chicago who learned a tough lesson in not whistling at married women.
    We had to hear about it for sixty years.”

    O: Wait – so PA, are you saying that you’re cool with what happened to Emmit Till?

    Really?

    O.

  31. Promoting Justice 02/27/2013 at 6:46 pm

    Why do you argue with racists Obsidian. They cant measure to your Dick point. You should contact us. Watch your blog for communication Brah.

  32. eric.cartman 02/28/2013 at 9:21 am

    everyday i wish for more liberals to get flash mobbed or get to be the main participent in knockout king

  33. K(yle) 02/28/2013 at 10:57 am

    Details?

    http://www.bis.doc.gov/complianceandenforcement/antiboycottcompliance.htm

    This is “Anti-Terror” legislation.

    Vox is a libertarian and is no liberal.

    He is a liberal. The only “useful” distinctions that exist between liberals and libertarians also exist between Left-Anarchists and liberals, but that doesn’t make black flag waving edgy anarchists right-wingers either.

    More importantly he’s a crank conspiracy theorist, so his solution to the market driven degeneracy of life in the modern world is to get the government out of brainwashing people into being degenerates (which they do because they literally worship Satan or something I guess?) at which point the market will take over and things can return to “normal” despite the fact that this would be bad for the economy, even his LvM alternative economy.

    I’m sure he’s got some goldbug mises.org copypasta rebuttal that I’m uninterested in hearing for the millionth time from the millionth source on the inherent right-wing nature of global transnationalist capitalism, that not only flies in the face of logic, common sense and evidence but also directly opposes what the fomenters of the current system have advocated from the start and every step along the way which has been fundamentally and totally left-wing.

    His announcements that Libertarianism is fundamentally Christian is laughable. It’s a fundamentally Christian doctrine pioneered almost exclusively by Jews, and is itself in a lineage with a medieval heresy within Rabbinical Juddaism that was eventually cribbed by that chic ‘Satanic’ theosophist Aleister Crowley.

    If you read Crowley you can see that he’s basically a proto-libertarian, and that like the Libertarian Party of the USA today that he’s preaching ‘organic unity’ by way of infinite Tolerance for all things people might choose to do. That society would be formed by these choices driving a marketplace of desires, and the only sin is intolerance which results in the stifling of desire (which Vox Day would call impinging on another’s liberty). This is libertarianism in a nutshell and it’s all founded in an interpretation of the Talmudic doctrine that Jews are the seeds of God, into Jews are co-equals with God, and therefore there is no judgement for or between Jews and “Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”. Libertarianism is just a Universalizing of this amorality to the whole of humanity.

    The “useful distinctions” between Vox and liberalism is that he’s at least equal parts Pat Robertson and Alex Jones in addressing the problems of the modern world; which is to say he does so without any need for evidence and just makes wild accusations which vary between bland Charismatic supernaturalism and government/Illuminati conspiracy theories and he supports this as a good thing under the label “Anti-Materialism” (but naturally this is only a good thing when he does it). That is before you even get to his libertarian left-wing nature, which is very rarely a topic he chooses to discuss instead of railing on a slightly different strain of liberal.

    He’s just packaging tolerance for depravity in a wrapper that is appealing to people rightfully disgusted and intolerant of depravity that might otherwise have the moral certitude to do something effectual about it.

  34. nikcrit 03/02/2013 at 12:24 am

    @K(yle)
    That link you provided regarding existing ‘anti-terror’ legilslation, via ‘anti-boycott’ requisites is pretty surreal.

  35. thordaddy 03/03/2013 at 10:50 pm

    The key question is not “is the liberal aware,” but rather, “why can’t the liberal believe?”

    Who cares if she isn’t aware of violent black flash mobs. We only care that she can’t believe that they actually happen. That state of being requires a more radical type of “autonomy” that borders on sickness.

  36. nikcrit 03/03/2013 at 11:18 pm

    @Thordaddy,
    Well, you did get close to precisely saying “radical autonomy.’ But I believe this is the first comment I’ve read by you that didn’t include the term “self-annihilating.”

    What’s up with the inconsistency? :)

  37. thordaddy 03/04/2013 at 3:07 am

    Well… Not believing that radical blacks actually violently “flash mob” and have been doing so for quite some time could certainly indicate a self-annihilating tendency found in the “good” white liberal.

    And isn’t that the real story? Good white liberals can’t believe they are actually SELF-annihilators?

  38. nikcrit 03/04/2013 at 9:49 am

    “isn’t that the real story?”

    I’d say it’s pretty close….my theory is to WHY it’s true is sort of existential: I attribute it to “Is-that-all-there-is?”-type nihilism, a natural tendency a generation or two into a given society’s culturally victorious racial or ethnic group… I’ve argued that is a perspective that is lacking and even bewildering to many in the alt-right, because most here are aspiring than bourgeois, culturally speaking.

    What, if anything, do you think of that suggestion? I’m curious.

  39. thordaddy 03/04/2013 at 3:09 pm

    Nikcrit,

    I don’t really see anything generational, cyclical or what have you.

    I see “white Supremacy” as that force engaging the white man in a battle for his psychology and standing dead set against the liberated and SELF-annihilating psychology. This is a psychological war within the white man himself that is being taken to its conceptual limits.

    One can live truthfully or one can live falsely. It is increasingly evident that one CANNOT float somewhere in between. Our psychologies, both individually and collectively, will not allow it.

    White Supremacy versus radical autonomy.

    A “free will” versus the “free” will.

    The pain of Ascension versus the Pleasure of descent.

    All “others” are simply facilitators of descent or just plain indifferent to the white man’s SELF-annihilation.

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