EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

i read that that kid whos mom got fired from nike for passing him sneaker info was not only using that info in his sneaker flipping business but was in fact selling it to third parties... in a newsletter lol

xps- it’ll be a smaller market than podcasts prob but it doesn’t mean it’s unsustainable i don’t think. there are lots of specialist writers with followers of a few hundred/couple thousand that do well

anyways i don’t really care abt substack the company i just liked blogs and it’s gotten ppl to write more blog style content than medium did so im invested in its success to the extent i want that to continue

even the podcast economy seems pretty dicey a majority of it seems to be propped up by those we reinvented socks type companies

the paywall is against the spirit of blogs open discourse is the thing im most opposed to but as long as most writers use the paywall option sparingly (which so far all but a few do) it should be fine

podcasts are here to stay imho

im sure theyre not going away but that doesnt mean the current conditions will persist, theres already big consolidation, and various factors will prob make it harder to have the types of grassroots success that weve seen til now

it seems like if substack had a like 10 newsletters for $20 type deal then you could have a li feed and whatnot it wld be good

i don't have anything against the substack model itself, but the people it seems to be rewarding most are just . . . Posters

being edited improves essentially everyone's writing, and traditional news organizations at least make a stab at certain guidelines and proprieties. (my understanding is that nymag had a team devoted to keeping sullivan from trodding too heavily on his own dick.)

the substack stars are stars because they tweet 75 times a day and are willing to be 'provocative' about matters they understand little better than anyone else. gg at least used to have sources; i'm not sure matty or sullivan have ever actually reported anything.

they're just making shit up as they go along, and being wrong about iraq or political horserace stuff or whatever that shit sullivan was on about sarah palin's baby never ends up mattering. there's already way too much op-ed in the world -- it's cheap! it riles people up! -- but at least in a newspaper you might get some other stuff too. paying money to read individual dumbasses' tweetstorms is for suckas

i don't have anything against the substack model itself, but the people it seems to be rewarding most are just . . . Posters

Klein’s podcast is some boring ass sh1t

― calstars, Monday, March 1, 2021 8:23 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Disagree! Long-time listener, big fan.

I also got a lot out of that Saunders interview, but YMMV.

Yeah i think most of klein is good. Def fan also.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gS6Y_Mhtz8U

Ha, I remember that. So funny.

of course ezra klein's wife wrote one of those "this one weird policy trick will fix everything!" books. just like yglesias' latest embarrassment, these ppl cannot help themselves

Seems a bit reductive to characterize a book about the potential benefits of UBI in that way. I mean, all books extolling a particular policy are going to be marketed with that sort of superficial gloss. I haven't read Lowrey's book, but I seem to recall that it was well-reviewed; I don't see her as the kind of journalist who's prone to the kind of glib provocation that Yglesias traffics in.

_goofus has to go to the shithole email startup, gallant gets to defend the status quo at the paper of record_


I’ve got the image of the actual Highlights comic in my head w Matt’s & Ezra’s faces and I honestly can’t quit laughing

w/ my conventional tastes, that shit is hilarious and now it’sin my head too. esp because my blog awareness of them links em together always even pre-vox. they are yin and yang the faces of janus and now goofusngallant ty

Seems a bit reductive to characterize a book about the potential benefits of UBI in that way

compared to my reductive opinions about her husband this is nothing

lmao

Glenn Greenwald Says ‘I Consider Tucker Carlson To Be A Socialist’ https://t.co/rPxAqLCtoA

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) March 4, 2021

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.”