EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

xpost - Rob went to Milwaukee twice last summer (gf is from there) and yeah on the whole Wisconsin was pretty much a wild west in terms of Covid.

I'm just gonna include Megan McArdle in the EK/MY discussion because I think this thread is pretty interesting:

There is lots of opprobrium for that! Every time we have this conversation I repeat that I am against your son wearing a mask during speech therapy! I now repeat it again!

Now, are you going to say that it's irresponsible not to get vaccinated?

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) December 15, 2021

You really see her struggling to come to terms with the limits of her libertarian philosophy, which demands that people largely left to make free choices will converge on optimal collective behavior because markets/information-sharing, and here she is confronted with the fact that people largely left to make free choices will choose en masse to eschew vaccination despite this not being the right choice for their own self-interest and the self-interest of others, and she just keeps on arguing with this guy -- don't you see that the invisible hand DEMANDS that you and people like you act correctly in this situation? and it's kind of tragic as it dawns on her that nothing short of the heavy-handed governmental freedom-squashing she hates most will get her to the policy outcome she most wants.

she's amazing. to my knowledge she's been right about absolutely nothing ever; the only book she's managed to write is subtitled 'Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success' and her ultimate legacy is supporting the grenfell tower fire as economically sound

people are not and have never been “left to make free choices” tho - this is partic the case with vaccination and public health. would that they were! opinions have been shaped by demagogues and bandits

freedom isn’t free, we just argue about the fee

Get back in your area pic.twitter.com/2YNtCv7I0B

— Nolan🌹 (@VoidOfRoses) January 4, 2022

Suppose you think that school closures were a disastrous, invasion-of-Iraq magnitude (or perhaps greater) policy decision. Shouldn't that merit some further reflection?

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) January 6, 2022

You think this was a policy decision (which of course is totally a decentralized one) equivalent to the deaths of 460,000 people and the destabilizing of an entire region?

And...do you think parents and educators have not been reflecting, ffs?

— Clara Jeffery (@ClaraJeffery) January 6, 2022

Yeah, I think depriving tens of millions of school children of an in-person education for a year or longer is absolutely on that magnitude. No question.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) January 6, 2022

stick to telling me who's going to win my state's senate race, Nate, and bow the fuck out

were there any schoolchildren in iraq

considering how many educations were disrupted in iraq and the surrounding region we must conclude that the iraq war was worse than the iraq war

this guy dumb

he has suffered from learning loss

doing asynchronous days with my kid were my personal Afghanistan

Nate's desire to be seen as a Rational Thinker unencumbered by foolish human biases has led him to be overly skeptical of some views that he, in his detachment, can judge as extreme and/or irrational. I think COVID mitigation measures fall into that category for him because it is unfortunately easy to view them through the lens of political and emotional bias (i.e., driven by anxious liberals).

remember when

This is not unique to coronavirus, but it feels like the people who know the *most* about something often express more uncertainty and doubt than people who have some adjacent knowledge but fall short of being subject-matter experts.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) March 13, 2020

I'm in the high-risk zone for having adjacent, sophomoric knowledge myself (know statistics, have written about epidemiology) which is why I'm mostly trying to shut up about coronavirus. But I will say be wary of overconfidence and trust folks who express uncertainty/doubt.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) March 13, 2020

Someone tell Nate a good way to avoid the appearance of being encumbered by foolish human biases would be to not to double down on making grotesque racist equivalencies

Why didn't the morons who called the Steel Dossier worse than the Iraq War get this treatment?

(citation needed)

now that nate silver has compared remote learning to the iraq war, matty is hard at work writing a 3000-word blog post in favor of it

— 𝖙𝖎𝖒𝖔𝖙𝖍𝖞💀𝖋𝖆𝖚𝖘𝖙 (@crulge) January 6, 2022

Xpost

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/russiagate-is-wmd-times-a-million

otm

nate silver's Very Bad Tweet perfectly reveals how the school reopening moral panic has worked: people say "we have to do cost-benefit analysis on covid mitigations," which sounds very reasonable, and then they say "okay, let's assume the cost of school closures is infinity"

— Will Stancil (@whstancil) January 6, 2022

And, teachers are expendable.

xxp yeah no one ever roasts Taibbi on Twitter or ILX

xxp oh sorry, I thought you were saying that people were comparing the allegations in the dossier to the war in Iraq. Yes, that Taibbi column is pretty dumb!

That substack thing doesn’t appear to say Russiagate was worse than the Iraq War, though.

it does say Russiagate is WMDs times a million!

specifically stupid times a million

"If he isn’t, news outlets once again swallowed a massive disinformation campaign, only this error is many orders of magnitude more stupid than any in the recent past, WMD included."

Taibbi's 'media criticism' schtick deserves one giant jackoff motion at this point but it has about the same relationship to "remote schools are the equivalent of 500k dead people" as a gnat does to an elephant.

no comment necessary pic.twitter.com/08sRqJaaei

— austerity is theft (@wideofthepost) January 15, 2022

lmao

The ape pictures from Bored Ape Yacht Club are pretty cool just evaluated as pictured. They’ve shown a lot of range here within the confines of the basic concept.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) February 15, 2022

some regular Andy Borhols

I like Les Miserables too (especially the 1998 film adaptation!) but how many people do we think are in prison for this loaf of bread to feed your family scenario? https://t.co/ejcqeJUU1x

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) March 25, 2022

In the tweet he quoted, Matt had three choices to respond to:

"if you sleep on the street or steal a loaf of bread or cross a border to escape violence against your family, the law will come for you"

His choice describes him well.

"especially the 1998 film adaptation"

Aimless otm even before you read the replies from public defenders citing cases where clients were arresting for stealing a candy bar, a can of baked beans, and a salami

The dividing line between the middle class and the upper middle class. https://t.co/rKxCyv1gHn

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) March 28, 2022

the lower middle class will cut you

“Talk Shit Get Hit” was the original slogan of the IWW.

this fuckin' guy

I mean at this point it’s hard to say — my hypothesis is that progressives spending days freaking out about Musk has pushed him further to the right.

Does that seem crazy to you?

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 27, 2022

my hypothesis is that Musk does what Musk thinks is good for Musk and whatever politics might be reflected in his public statements have nothing to do with Musk having political convictions.

I think the people catastrophizing about contraception or interracial marriage being next after Roe sincerely believe it. But I'm sorry, I cannot take this seriously.

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) May 5, 2022

The net effect of overturning Griswold is that contraception will continue to be legal in all 50 states. In a few states, it might become harder to get certain IUDs and the morning after pill, but even that is dubious.

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) May 5, 2022

i mean sure i think they will do it but

and this idiot is still beloved by rightist intelligensia:

Planned Parenthood was founded not simply as an organization for limiting the size of families in general but more particularly to reduce the reproduction of the black population in the United States, as Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger herself noted.

— Thomas Sowell (@ThomasSowell) May 4, 2022

And the Dems were once the party of segregation!!!!

The rhetorical move McArdle is doing here is to verbally suggest that the "catastrophe" is merely speculative and has to do with birth control or Loving v. Texas, rather than the actually imminent catastrophe re Roe that she would rather not talk about.

(Also she carefully skips over the most frequent "what's next????" question, which is Obergefell. I wonder why?)

lord knows I hate Sowell, but that isn't his personal twitter; it's an account that tweets out quotes from his books (which I suppose could be him actually). That one is from 2006. I'm sure context doesn't make it any more compelling a fact, but still

it is very sad to think there is a guy out there who is a big enough thomas sowell fan to create such a project

men will literally set up a thomas sowell quotes account instead of going to therapy amirite

yes and lol

oh, I'm sure the effects of any of these things being overturned will never filter up to these columnists. Remember Welfare Reform? They said it would be a catastrophe, and then we did it and never heard a peep about it from any of our friends.