EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

being a pundit just ravishes peoples minds

Lowrey is still on the UBI beat:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/stocktons-basic-income-experiment-pays-off/618174/

Ezra should have delayed his latest column a bit, I think.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/04/opinion/biden-american-rescue-plan.html

"If you can dial down the conflict, you can dial up the policy."

Performatively not understanding performative outrage.

the tweet didn't post

I don’t really get this story … if people aren’t happy with the expensive private schools they’ve enrolled their kids in then maybe … don’t send them there? https://t.co/bu2V5RYpZ0

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) March 10, 2021

let them fight

This is an extremely good faith summary of my view from the blogger most devoted to his couch.

Let me observe again that the more impactful journalism someone does, the more hatred is harbored by bloggers who can't & don't: that's why they're fine with seeing Assange imprisoned. https://t.co/ncBp2A8aog

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 9, 2021

Misrepresentation of facts x facts not in evidence from the dude couchsurfing at tucker’s crib

his second tweet there indicates he has embraced an amusing form of projection-trolling

Remember the racist cop who excused the Atlanta spa shooter by saying he had a “really bad day”?

Turns out that if you watch the video in context that’s not what happened ... he was relaying the suspect’s statement to the press as part of a briefing. https://t.co/RjRcsjroXz

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) March 19, 2021

Absolute pudding brain

It’s not going to happen, but IMO it would kind of be better if 80% of the nation’s housing stock were owned by like 7 giant national landlording franchises and the normal way for families to live was to sign a long-term lease with some kind of early termination option. https://t.co/kjSIICRXOQ

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 4, 2021

Serfdom: c/d

almost like ‘guy Twitter made up to be mad at’ if he wasn’t real

just spectacular

yeah that's what i was thinking like if he was just an experiment to post the dumbest thing? is this for a documentary someone is doing, or a paper? it's just unbelievable

candid camera but for twitter

he's "good at" making a certain segment of twitter get v mad at him, seems to relish it and intentionally frame points in a way to push their buttons. like homeownership as a vehicle of societal wealth accumulation is a pretty terrible institution; real estate being a "good investment" for one generation by definition makes homes "unaffordable" for the next generation and also invites speculation, bubbles, etc. but framing it in relation to a national landlord oligopoly seems engineered to make ppl mad

Maybe his kink is having people yell “why not just have social housing?!?!” at him.

I think this substack thing is inherently bad for him -- once you don't have a salary are are paid by the subscriber, your incentives flop all the way over to "write whatever drives the most engagement" which is "stuff that annoys people and gets quote-tweeted and gets my name out there." I know a lot of you are like "he is exactly the same and he sucks before and he sucks now" but that's not what I think, I think he's basically good and this new system will inevitably make him worse.

do you know that he supported the iraq war and responded to mass death at a factory collapse with an article arguing that lax safety standards were ok for poor countries? and that these opinions are very much in line with idk if its a world view or something deeper down in his psychology a way of being seeing everything as a thought experiment, its quite sociopathic, and of course is completely in line with the current technocratic liberal regime

he is also on a more minor note as with everyone who thinks they can figure things out from first principals consistently extravagantly wrong

more than wrong really just fundamentally clueless out in left field, his recent arguing against the messaging of defund the police was just crystalline yglesias completely ignorant of the fact that he didnt even posses a theory of of the issue at hand 100% confidently reasoning his way through it in public, saying things like "police are public servants therefor", completely shamelessly contemptuous of the entire concept of knowledge, an utterly lazy dire take factory

do you know that he supported the iraq war and responded to mass death at a factory collapse with an article arguing that lax safety standards were ok for poor countries? and that these opinions are very much in line with idk if its a world view or something deeper down in his psychology a way of being seeing everything as a thought experiment, its quite sociopathic, and of course is completely in line with the current technocratic liberal regime

― lag∞n, Sunday, April 4, 2021 10:49 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

eh i think rxn is basically hysterical, your position in 2011 is still p much otm. he's a centrist econ pundit, useful to the extent he entertainingly digests the news and policy discussions, the people still blood-boilingly mad at dumb takes he has had should relax imho

I think this substack thing is inherently bad for him -- once you don't have a salary are are paid by the subscriber, your incentives flop all the way over to "write whatever drives the most engagement" which is "stuff that annoys people and gets quote-tweeted and gets my name out there." I know a lot of you are like "he is exactly the same and he sucks before and he sucks now" but that's not what I think, I think he's basically good and this new system will inevitably make him worse.

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Sunday, April 4, 2021 10:32 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

less ppl read him now than at any point in the last ten years, cause it now costs 8$ a month to read his posts v.s. free. even if it means he's pivoted to the right/centre as a result, haters ought to relish this

feel like ezra is a more likable and otm but matt is a deeper thinker so i dunno

― ice cr?m

lol, ezra is actual shit but Matty y is less likable and as shallow as they come and almost never anywhere near the money except for sweet substack $ which even there he fucked himself with the lesser guaranteed payout

10 years ago though, we all had bad takes back in the day

both can be true

eh i think rxn is basically hysterical, your position in 2011 is still p much otm. he's a centrist econ pundit, useful to the extent he entertainingly digests the news and policy discussions, the people still blood-boilingly mad at dumb takes he has had should relax imho

― flopson, Monday, April 5, 2021 2:03 AM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

does he digest anything i dont think so, and i think its fine to be mad at awful people

i mean its maybe not a worthwhile use of ones time but

If they weren’t allowed to be such giant dumbasses in public, we wouldn’t be able to get mad at them

I feel like Matty infuriates people because no matter how many times he gets dunked on for idiocy it only makes him stronger and richer

go ahead. keep screaming "Shut The Fuck Up " at me. it only makes my opinions Worse

— wint (@dril) March 10, 2018

Matty parody account that quotes his tweets and appends them with “ain’t I a stinker.”

Sadly, not every good idea is electorally viable. pic.twitter.com/QQO4yC1Oni

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 18, 2021

How are we getting to a billion Americans without expanded immigration?

I like how Matt bravely protects Gun Regulation by killing a member of the public.

I guess he looked at his book's sales figures.

Shout out to Andy Sullivan for being worse than both of these nerds combined.

What is your explanation of the simply incredible over-representation of Ashkenazi Jews in Nobel Prizes? A group long despised and discriminated against and murdered? Tell me.

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) April 19, 2021

Simple: Swedes are thirsty for our swarth

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ezf1XusXsAQlhhN?format=jpg&name=small

I think he deleted it, but I don't even understand that one. "The police killed someone" is a factual description of what happens when the police use lethal force in a manner that causes someone's death, regardless of their intent.

What are the exceptions he is worried about?

yeah I was gonna ask which incident inspired him to write that horseshit, but there's not a good answer to be had

how many times is this now that he's freely announced he's a fucking moron

icymi:

Not aligned with her on policy, but Sinema definitely seems like the senator it would be most entertaining to hang out with. pic.twitter.com/UnkmJTZCtE

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 18, 2021

"Police killed someone" is plain language whose meaning is immediately understood, but "used lethal force" is antiseptic and inert, implying that the event was wholly impersonal, as if both the victim and the police were variables in an equation whose product was "the deceased".

xp Matt Yglesias’s favorite TV show is Young Sheldon.

I don't mind some of Yglesias's contrarian impulses when they are in the service of advocating for progressive policies, but as mainstream journalists have become more receptive to ideas on the left, it feels like Yglesias has now decided to exercise his contrarianism from the right, questioning what he now sees as liberal orthodoxy by positioning himself as a reasonable moderate.

He always seemed to want to carve out his own position, separate from orthodoxies on the right or left. He tends to focus on issues that aren't traditionally associated with the left-right spectrum, such as NIMBYism and zoning. So I don't think he has changed all that much, apart from maybe realizing there is an underserved market niche for an audience (call them moderates, or maybe traditional neoliberals) who are increasingly uncomfortable with how some identity issues are becoming polarized in the mainstream liberal media.

I think he deleted it, but I don't even understand that one. "The police killed someone" is a factual description of what happens when the police use lethal force in a manner that causes someone's death, regardless of their intent.

― jaymc, Wednesday, April 21, 2021 9:00 AM (three hours ago)

this is the kind of thing he posts that makes me think he is dumb as a rock. using lethal force is killing. whether or not you believe it is justified or a murder it's a killing either way. unless his point is that we should be more euphemistic when referring to police killing people

Between Matty and this Eichenwald Tweet it's reallyt crossing the line from "ah, the pundit class" into "maybe these guys are just sick fucks sitting around thinking about ways to inject nuance into murdering children"

George Floyd: Murder
Tamir Rice: Reckless murder
Breonna Taylor: Reckless murder
Eric Garner: Murder
Philando Castille: Murder
Stephon Clark: Reckless murder or manslaughter
Daunte Wright: Probably manslaughter
Trayvon Martin: Manslaughter

I'm sorry. Ma'Khia Bryant: justified.

— Kurt "Masks Save Lives" Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) April 21, 2021

*really

my esteem for eichenwald has plummeted after following him diligently on twitter for the past eight months; every good thing he says is countered by something asinine, something he didn't research on his own (he asks Eric Feigl Ding for insight on coronavirus--Ding is a twitter grifter who should not be consulted), or something hyperbolic that results in nothing (he loudly proclaimed he 'had' the people responsible for harassing him online, that it involved all kinds of important people on the right, that the revelation was coming soon.....that was like five months ago). I think he's kind of a dummy.

yeah this has been known for years that he's a nutjob

eichenwald is the hentai guy, no?