EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

i dunno if i've come clean about this but i have a war-nerd streak so

ackerman talks about that time the most; i did not know weigel was one of them. feel a little weird for knowing about this crap tbh.

― goole, Monday, January 3, 2011 1:01 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

me too but on the other hand did u know that ezra klein became a health care reform expert to impress simon schamas daughter chloe

no i was unaware. she must be pretty fine.

i think i find the stuff he covers interesting, but i guess i dont really, i read him occasionally at wired xp re ackerman

lol max whatre u talkin abt

haha i have been under the impression that i knew a lot of gossip abt these ppl but now that i am thinking about it the thing about chloe schama is the only gossip-y nugget i know, kind of disappointed in myself

http://grab.by/8b5N

anyway when i saw ezra klein on tv i was surprised his persona seemed more journalistic glory days upstart young reporter than coddled nerdface technocratic blogger - i liked him

he has an early 80s newspaper look and feel to him

Yglesias has been wrong many times.

Klein meanwhile is a duller writer but his steady crunching of numbers is ultimately educational.

yglesiases willingness to be ambitious and wrong is imo what makes him compelling - like i understand theres danger in utopian thinking but still reimagining the world and its institutions is def one of my hobbies

who has better trolls?

― goole, Monday, January 3, 2011 11:51 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

to answer my own q, i don't really know. klein's comments are pretty boring but i have noticed yglesias' "community" to be especially vicious and repetitive. neither of them seem to really care much but i think both have made gestures to get more involved. terrible drudgery, sounds like, to me.

as far as blogger gossip goes, can anyone verify that there are, in fact, paid trolls out there? i'd hate to think it was mere dedication causing the same people to say the same things in the same place every day

theres only one blog i can think of that has good comments, really feel like 'comments off' should be the default

TNC i assume?

your bløg has good comments joe

yah tnc and lol of course goes w/o saying my blog

btw how much does this trolling gig pay, who do i contact

i know, right

i saw an interview w/yglesias where he was like all my readers really hate me i have no idea why they come to my blog

he was k funny tbh

eh i've watched a few of his bloggingheads's and he comes off like a jerk imo, interrupting, going on and on

ha yeah ive never been able to bring myself to watch a blogginghead and in general id much rather read than watch any news type thing but for some reason i saw this it was a friendly interview at a like blogg convention where they we just joking around

anyway my head says klein but my heart goes yglesias, not sure what to do, prob follow my heart

yglesias is good on urban issues - not that he says anything new, but at least he's talking to relatively wide audience. but still...super annoying on a personal level. I like klein.

Yglesias is a philosophy major in every word he writes and this is awesome about him.

ugh this is gonna be like that week i read glenn greenwald isnt it

neither of these guys is much like glenn greenwald

unless you have some sort of distaste for american journalists, then yes it'll be like that lol

these guys are on the sensible/technocratic side of the great progressive blogger divide - greenwald exists on the polemic/activist shore - which is not to say hes any more or less otm, just that hes harder to take

nah, that was what i liked abt greenwald its just that in the end i was like "wtf this is not my country i dont care"

haha

yeah but usa is in charge of the rest of the countries iirc

when krugman is updating regularly i don't have much of a reason to follow klein too closely - i don't hate him or anything though

[Yglesias is] a shitty writer imo

Actually, typos aside, he's not. He's remarkably concise and clear even if he liberally sprinkles his posts with "negative externalities" this and "regulatory capture" that jargon.

yglesias is embarrassed about having been a socialist and will occasionally mix in some right wing tinted bullshit to try and build a bit of center cred. i have grown to hate him. klein is kind of a young dinner party blogger but i keep the feed there to flick thru. i enjoy greenwald's secular fire and brimstone and i get angry about the same things as him. his biases are so transparent that is is v easy to think critically about what he writes.

maybe ill face the winner of this one off w/greenwald

can't wait

feel like klein is getting sold short here - he was hands down the best all around guy on health care reform

his coverage was comprehensive but his opinions were so milquetoast it was like reading a blog by that dude on gawker

feel like his opinions were pretty otm especially compared w/almost everyone elses which basically added up to OMG PUBLIC OPTION

they both kind of remind me of how a lot of people move to dc and get kind of absorbed into the weird political networky culture here at a pretty young age. dc is so conservative.

would love to run into these guys at a bbq and get into a drunken political argument

since the democratic primaries, even when drunk i try to sidestep political arguments. i ran into weigel at a bar one time but did not pick a fight. he is a good dude imo. that's actually one of the few blogs i regularly read - don't have time/energy to slog through a lot of content anymore.

yeah ive had v little exposure to it but dc political culture seen close up seems v strange

seems so unbearable. lotta people wearing new balances on the weekend and shit.

they r not sexy rip

never trust a libertarian

or a journalist

lol i own 2 pair of new balances

just sayin if u cannot figure how to dress how are u gonna run the country

daria i seen the shoes youre buying, you know what youre doing

apparently the events these people were at were like idea trading speed dating where you'd toss a bunch of them in a room and they'd have to talk to each other for three minutes before changing conversation partners, or at least that is what someone who was not an attendee but heard about the whole deal has said

really sounds like the kind of shenanigans that other moneyed types who liked the idea of having a network of influential thinkers/do-ers in their pocket have done. you know the type

An exchange of ideas should take no longer than does to buy some cocaine.

what if we brought together a group based on... dialogue (sic)

let's get fucking granular

just four guys in a room, getting back to the basics

to be fair, you can sum up thiel's entire shtick in three minutes as long as you don't delve too deeply into the psychosocial underpinnings

to be fair, you can sum up thiel's entire shtick in three minutes as long as you don't delve too deeply into the psychosocial psychopathic underpinnings

― mh, Wednesday, June 17, 2026 10:17 AM (twenty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Fixed.

An exchange of ideas should take no longer than does to buy some cocaine.

― The Quaker Gurvitz Army (President Keyes), Wednesday, June 17, 2026 10:12 AM (thirty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

not if you buy the cocaine first

beginning to think that what klein meant by kirk did politics the right way is he got billionaires to fund him

Klein's latest Times podcast was pretty fucking gross - he's talking to Chris Hayes about "attention" as political currency, discussing various Democratic Congressional candidates (Platner, Ossoff, Al-Sayed, Talarico) purely on the basis of how much attention they've been able to get, and treating their popularity as entirely about personal charisma. Zero discussion of any candidate's actual platform and whether the Democratic primary electorate might actually be responding to their positions on issues. (Except for the fact that support for Israel is now a major liability in a Democratic primary. Klein talks A LOT about that.)

Another place where the Kirk and Klein camps can really come together is over how the welfare state is bad and inefficient & makes people lazy and dependent, but billionaire disrupters and their surveillance/ murder tech is actually baller as hell and using public funds for it is good and righteous and innovative

The fact that "The Abundance Movement" bubbled up at the worst possible moment--in the wake of the DOGE disaster--told us that there had to be billionaire money pushing it. And guess what?

where is klein in the wired article?

Ah i read the wired article not the stanford daily because why would i

Which articles are you talking about?

o i see. so many big ideas guys.

https://bsky.app/profile/crimew.gay/post/3moejlixgvc2z

how do we know klein is a thiel dialog member? aside from this thread. if you know because X, well fuck that i don’t do that. so i looked for sourcing on google. wired seems reasonable. nope. ok, stanford daily.

if you read x, are you happy possibly to contribute to this?

https://bsky.app/profile/quinnslobodian.com/post/3moitszmhs225

pres keyes i was not aiming x comments to you. statement of my genl objections to x

Klein sucks whether he’s a member of the fascist techbro cabal

really good dig into the Abundance/ “Affordability” discourse, and how little there actually is under the hood besides more deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy.

also notes the Party’s & Dem aligned media’s focus on Mamdani’s charisma instead of his actual policies (as per unperson’s post upthread)

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/citations-needed/id1258545975?i=1000761654223

oops. Not that one. This one:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/citations-needed/id1258545975?i=1000773149304

if you read x, are you happy possibly to contribute to this?

https://bsky.app/profile/quinnslobodian.com/post/3moitszmhs225

― just what is it that you think the "ilxor algorithm" directs? (Hunt3r), Wednesday, June 17, 2026 11:21 AM (six hours ago)

don't love it but there's good hoops talk there

there is only one good place for hoops discussion that is ilxor dot com board i love hoops

If the Klein be Naomi
You’re all set, homie
If the Klein be Ezra
I’d reassess, bruh

who was Ezra rumored to be in a polycule with, like a year ago? Caitlin Dewey is posting "three married, big-name journalists are in a secret polycule" as a blind item, and two of them have to be Ezra and Annie, but I can't remember the third, and Google is no help.

gotta be Nate Silver. he manages the spreadsheet

oh Jesus Christ, it was Bari Weiss, wasn't it?

I don’t think so..:

abundance in the streets, abundance in the sheets

dont let anyone tell you being a liberal apologist for right wing bigotry is an easy job

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:of56nmyuqzvjta7qlf7gwht6/bafkreihve33jvh6pshsuxuj4bojscy5va3o2glhaij3v6wc6d2o4hescae