EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

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

new balance are great sneakers, just dont wear them on the weekend or max will shun u

you pride yourself on living in the mouth of the dragon but being fireproof, and then one day you realize it is saturday and you are in whole foods buying ingredients for a cool mac n cheese with a twist recipe you found online, wearing new balance sneakers

^^ gets it

i mean tbh i would rather live in boston than dc, at least some people there have accents

where would ilx end up siding on a boston vs dc poll?

it would turn into an argument about pizza

harDCore

whole foods, new balance sneakers, check. i don't really care about recipes

boston sucks, accents there are horrible. i hate boston

in that case the poll would require a 'neither' option xp

i am in boston with an accent. thx daria.

except <3 the patriots but the rest of new england can have them. the rest of new england hates boston more than anyone

sorry roberto! team providence.

providence: boston
baltimore: dc

daria u from pvd? i didnt know

nope not at all just spent some time there. i like it. it's like baltimore kinda. lots more weird than the other major city, more arts scene, better music, etc

Reading the drug policy transcript, it does in fact seem pretty technocratic wonk-y and doesn't share the right goals IMO.

ie

If what you care about the most was a drop in drug arrests and involvement of people who use drugs and deal drugs in the criminal justice system, then it was a success clearly because there was very little contact anymore between law enforcement and people who sell and deal drugs.

But on the health side, no, I don’t think that. And those statistics on treatment I believe count a lot of one time consultations. I think what most people, particularly people who love someone who has an addiction, are looking for is evidence on people getting better, people getting into recovery, not just at some point having some transitory contact with the system.

Yeah, I don't think that addiction/recovery and 'people who love an addict' (shades of victims' rights ideology) should be a key part of drug policy given the state of law enforcement in the US. They go on to overdoses and fent and such but IMO that just highlights the fundamental flaw of (libertarian) decriminalization over legalization (and regulation). If heroin/coke users had regulated, legal avenues of obtaining their drug of choice fentanyl contamination from powder being cut on the wrong surface is minimized if not eliminated, same with overdoses related to unexpected strength of the product.

Matt Yglesias deleted this heinous tweet so I volunteer to archive it for him pic.twitter.com/BZmLOb7jtF

— Kate Willett (@katewillett) May 12, 2024

Matty revised

US bombing of Vietnam was destructive and morally wrong. But when I tried to look up the long-term impact on economic development, I found this paper arguing that it was smaller than you might think. pic.twitter.com/5Mhc1ebz7i

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) May 12, 2024

"But"

bombing him wouldnt have much long term impact either

Yeah, I don't think that addiction/recovery and 'people who love an addict' (shades of victims' rights ideology) should be a key part of drug policy given the state of law enforcement in the US. They go on to overdoses and fent and such but IMO that just highlights the fundamental flaw of (libertarian) decriminalization over legalization (and regulation). If heroin/coke users had regulated, legal avenues of obtaining their drug of choice fentanyl contamination from powder being cut on the wrong surface is minimized if not eliminated, same with overdoses related to unexpected strength of the product.

― papal hotwife (milo z), Saturday, May 11, 2024 5:16 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

The guest is very pro legalization with regulation and very critical of libertarian decriminalization. That’s what a lot of the episode is about.

I’m also straining to see the victims rights comparison you are drawing tbh.

A third party's feelings (victims of crime, families of addicts) being used to determine public policy is a poor idea in general.

The guest's references to legalization and regulation consist of weed and the need to regulate dispensaries - his other positive examples are all individual criminalization (if lighter than the mass incarceration regime) but that's okay because they also added more money for rehab. And he's explicitly critical of regulated, legal supply.

One of his statements on that - "But the problem with that reasoning is we did flood communities with legally made, consistent quality, clearly labeled opioids for years. And the net effect was millions of people getting addicted and hundreds of thousands of people dying." - ignores that overdose rates increased when that legally made, consistent supply was withdrawn. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2023/09/12/us-overdose-deaths-opioid-crisis/) Never mind that actively pushing opioid use (via pill mills) (differs greatly from the existence of regulated supply.)

Matty had the wrong continuation, so I fixed it.

US bombing of Vietnam was destructive and morally wrong. But... it killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians, continuing decades after the US lost the war, through unexploded bombs and mines peppered across all three of those nations, with many of them killing children, all of... which had a smaller economic impact than you might think.

xp which is simply to note that when you say that if one just had an open mind toward the Ezraverse one might actually have a lot in common with the former Obama staff wonk of the week, I’m not sure that’s true.

(And that’s ignoring the dumb throwaway line about destroying capitalism.)

Ezraverse

you lost me

Center-Man: Across the Ezraverse

i listened a bit to klein’s piece with “GROWTH AT ANY COST” pethakoukis which presented an infuriating and astonishingly dishonest mischaracterization of the past 50 years of usa economy. i was like out of my body angry at klein’s refusal/inability to address the many primary factors of the fundamentals of changes in it, which results in a slowing of economic growth vs the 50s and 60s. Very accepting of “yeah it’s just suffocating effects of regulatory government” by my quick listen. shit work. he’s writing a book about it now, wtf it better point at waaaay more than that.

Really? I actually got the sense that Klein was disagreeing with him and asking him questions he couldn’t answer that gave the lie to his thesis.

Our goal should be to get to 1b loyal, dynamic Americans this century. https://t.co/dzildfstLM

— @jason (@Jason) May 28, 2024

We should test them, vet them and embrace them deeply.

Help us, neoliberalism, you’re our only hope

I don’t think Biden should shift his rhetoric to start talking down the economy or whatever it is people are now advising — he should issue regulatory waivers and re-write rules in ways that promote lower costs and higher productivity and stop inflationary debt cancellations.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) May 29, 2024

When Obama was president, liberal pundits loved to quote Keynes “the boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.”

This is the boom he was talking about! https://t.co/V5x4LwqDxN

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) May 29, 2024