EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

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

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

*Pinter

more of an Arthur Hailey novel

k3v how many podcasts do you listen to?

― mookieproof, Thursday, May 9, 2024 1:37 AM (ten hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

ha not very many tbh, and I haven’t listened to one of his pods in prob 6 months or so. I just think lumping him in with obvious hacks is silly…you could argue his version of lib trojan horsing is even more pernicious if anything

i mean in the big scheme of things they arent that different, in the small scheme of coming up in the blogosphere, "founding" vox.com together, and being hacks, sure there are differences i guess thats what the threads about tho

the thing is he’s just obv a lot smarter and more contemplative and curious than those other guys. but again maybe that’s my hang up

hes very contemplative and curious and never ever reaches a conclusion that might threaten his continued employment at the nytimes

hes very contemplative and curious and never ever reaches a conclusion that might threaten his continued employment at the nytimes

― lag∞n, Thursday, 9 May 2024 12:20 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

nah nyt needs klein more than he needs them. he has a huge audience and would bring lots of readers/listeners with him if he left for the atlantic or set up a substack or patreon or whatever. no doubt they’re paying him a fortune but he’d probably make even more if he went solo. yglesias is making seven figures and is much less popular than klein, and there’s no way ezra is making that much from nyt. he’d have both more money and more editorial freedom if he left the times, imo the reason he takes the pay cut is cause he likes having the nyt audience and values the prestige

if anything writing/podding for nyt makes ezra shade his takes left relative to his “true” personal opinions

the nytimes does not need ezra klein lol, and yeah im sure substack would pay him more, but the whole thing about being a good careerist is well thinking about your career, he likes having the nyt audience and values the prestige yeah those are good career things, cashing out via substack is just cashing out but theres no guarantee of that being a lasting way to make money or advance yr career

yglesias is making seven figures

You think??? This is really hard for me to imagine.

Like, from what?

sadly its from people paying to read his newsletter

Now he’s struck gold on the newsletter platform Substack, where at least 13,000 people each pay Matt Yglesias an average of $80 a year for access to his Yglesiasms https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2023/01/11/matt-yglesias-slow-boring-in-bidens-washington/

yglesias is making seven figures

You think??? This is really hard for me to imagine.

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Thursday, 9 May 2024 3:35 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

last time i saw numbers (which was over a year ago) he had about 13,000 paying subscribers, paying about 110$ per year. i assume he has quite a bit more than that now

cashing out via substack is just cashing out but theres no guarantee of that being a lasting way to make money or advance yr career

― lag∞n, Thursday, 9 May 2024 3:25 PM (eleven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

idk a few years ago i would’ve said it’s a risk but by now it seems pretty sustainable

in a way it’s sweet that you think that klein secretly holds consensus shattering opinions that would get him fired from the nyt but holds back due to financial incentives. i prefer the occam’s razor explanation and think that his writing from the past 15 years is an accurate depiction of his true ideology

in a way it’s sweet that you think that klein secretly holds consensus shattering opinions

― flopson, Thursday, May 9, 2024 3:45 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

first of all suck my dick, thats all actually

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