EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

damn it’s getting sexual in the ezra and matty thread

its been 0 posts since a good post

i think i got that backward anyway in the american vernacular suck my dick is actually sentiment of aggression not sexuality which i know is kinda weird if youre not familiar with it

lol sorry if my post struck a nerve.. but the idea that financial incentives of writing for the nyt audience are constraining *ezra klein* to be more of a centrist and less critical of power just seems to be based on an outdated model of how this stuff works. it’s not like big legacy media is just shifting around pundits like pawns. klein is an independent and highly successful vector of technocratic centrism. he’s one of the main conduits by which libertarian policy ideas are re-packaged and sold to liberals—that’s why people like tyler cowen love him. from blogging to founding vox, that’s been his ideology for decades, he doesn’t need dean baquet to tell him to write that stuff. and if yglesias is a good counterfactual for what klein would be writing if he were unconstrained by establishment media, klein would be writing much more centrist and aggressive left-punching stuff. you can even see it in the way this thread’s got bumped over the last few years; whenever it’s bumped about yglesias it’s someone mad that he’s written a substack called like “Why Joe Biden Should Moderate On Abortion” or “Now Is A Wonderful Time For Fiscal Austerity”, whereas when it’s bumped about klein it’s k3v or jaymc being like “this podcast where klein interviews michael pollan about the psychic benefits of microdosing lsd and mushrooms is highly elucidating.” nyt refashioning klein into a new ira glass means he’s doing much *less* of the centrist policy writing he used to do. if he weren’t at the nyt most likely he’d be doing more of that stuff

instead of writing snippy media explainers you couldve considered my post in the context of the conversation we were having which was only two posts long and was not that complicated, kevins claim the klein is contemplative and curious doesnt square with his perfect technocrats career is all, thats why his current ideas man phase seems very schticky imho, because if youre truly curious and introspective you will eventually arrive at least a single inconvenient conclusion

it's funny that contemplative and curious people seem to always arrive at the conclusion that supports their preconceived notions and ideology

bunch of wasted effort, inefficient

always important to appear convincingly as something other than what you are though, crucial part of ideology

im not really ideological more of a common sense guy

Let's dig into the data

No, let's never look at data at all because that's too wonky and boring and something something neoliberalism technocracy ideology. The recent episode on drug policy, just for example, was excellent, and gets into the details of what is and isn't working in trying to achieve the very goals I'm guessing posters itt would share, but let's ignore it because neither EK nor his guest called for the end of capitalism and that stuff is boring.

you gotta laugh you know thats just life

https://i.imgur.com/Qf703B0.png

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.