EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

amazing that matty tries to categorize defund the police as identity politics

not so amazing if matty firmly believes that the major function of the police is to enforce racial and class norms and that voters clearly understand this and vote according to where they stand within that system of privilege. I've no idea if matty grasps this concept consciously and openly or just unconsciously and implicitly bcz he's a white American.

reasonable point

someone posted a screencap of Yglesias in 2016 essaying about how you can't divorce identity politics from politics because it's the only real and consistent form of politics

but Matty has deleted yesterday's tweet so I can't find it

The contrarian grift is getting competitive so here's Matty insisting Tucker Carlson and Stephen fucking MILLER are not white nationalist extremists: https://t.co/zb11RWpfr1

— Eli Valley (@elivalley) June 25, 2021

He deleted the tweet — the sad part is, I bet it's because he spelled Miller's first name with a "v" instead of a "ph".

The tweet

Deleted already, usually he waits a few weeks pic.twitter.com/tq5787D9dN

— Eli Valley (@elivalley) June 25, 2021

Do you think he has an inner life or is he just an automaton

Anyone defending this fucker past this point is extremely suspect imo

brooks to yglesias is approximately the rate of change pic.twitter.com/ZXZTg49X26

— Whet Moser (@whet) July 3, 2021

tf

lol at "twitter is real life" tbf

hell yeah bud they’re totally buying in on those hard hitting truth bombs you’re selling out of the back of your substack, and def not just a bunch of bloodless freaks who require their worldview reflected back to them while the ocean burns

i know haters itt won't cop to it but klain reading yglesias is a huge improvement over obama reading david brooks. just on monetary/fiscal policy (probably the most important thing the white house has leverage on rn) matt is way more dovish than the median wonk

in general it's kinda wild how online the biden administration are. like economists on staff and in advisory positions are disproportionately ones who have been active on twitter within the past 3 years

Yglesias may be relatively dovish but the Biden team still seems to be fixated on triangulating with increasingly extreme (R) positions which I guess is how we end up at privatizing the TVA.

That, or they’re just using all this posturing to cover for the fact that the core platform of the Democratic Party is still rapacious neoliberalism.

Failing ever upward...

🚨NEW: D.C. journalists @lkmcgann and Mark Bauman are launching a new, DC-based media company with $10 million+ Series A funding
— @mattyglesias will be editor at large
— Have already hired 20+ people, aiming to have ~60 by end of year
— Launching Septhttps://t.co/syKJXKefrd

— Sara Fischer (@sarafischer) July 10, 2021

Guess we'll never get to witness the pure race science era of Matty's substack career.

(Until whatever billionaires are funding this pull the rug out when Biden's not in the White House anymore.)

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

Not politicians comfortable calling people faggots, politicians who *only just recently* became uncomfortable and thus make people with retrograde cultural views feel comfortable with him. https://t.co/C1dnv4wEaq

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 2, 2021

I think Yglesias's main things right now are "kill single family zoning" and "the DOJ should be prosecuting crimes committed by Trump administration officials instead of gaily letting bygones be bygones"

I'm in favor of killing single family zoning, Matty is good again

Matty is good again

he'll move on to worse crap soon enough

I don’t think people were upset that you engaged in something contentious— I think they were upset that you dropped the F bomb as a straight person. pic.twitter.com/zNcLPbaYcc

— Michael Havlin (@HavlinMichael) August 2, 2021

I honestly hadn't realized that a straight person typing out 'the f-slur' was considered beyond the pale in a context like this (responding to a direct question about the word, obviously not 'using' the slur etc), but lots of people responding to Yglesias here seem think so. I knew that this was conventual wisdom with the n-word but thought that was essentially a unique thing? Is this a recent development, or is are people just mad in this case because it's Yglesias and he's an annoying guy who likes to passive-aggressively troll people on twitter?

I think people got pissed at him because he was the one who broached the subject, and it seemed like he did so specifically because it would allow him the opportunity to use the word (in a "just askin' questions here, guy" way, of course of course of course). It was a typical asshole move.

that's his own affair

Matty deleted all his tweets - not just the ones related to this latest kerfuffle.

It’s like the Library of Alexandria has burned all over again.

(Also this shit was stupid even without the slur, cultural conservatives aren’t going to see Matt Damon as anything but another Hollywood liberal pedophile no matter how many slurs he uses.)

To answer soref's question, I certainly wouldn't use the f slur even in a context like that. It's just not necessary, everyone knows what's being talked about, imo.

does anyone even remember what the joke was and if it's anything other than making fun of fearful teen masculine absurdity by having conjoined twins call each other gay as a put-down

Yglesias wrote something smart. I guess the key is to just not follow/read him on Twitter.

honestly him trolling the Orbanites on twitter all week is his redeeming quality

xp. In my opinion, not much good comes out of twitter to begin with.

Matty deleted all his tweets - not just the ones related to this latest kerfuffle.

― o. nate, Monday, August 2, 2021 3:11 PM (five days ago) bookmarkflaglink

hes had his tweets auto deleting for a while

I think Yglesias is trying to bait the Orban-simps into pointing out that he's Jewish and he may well succeed

Well whaddaya know, the rare Jew named “churches”

When I'm right I'm right

They’re onto me pic.twitter.com/FWVzrPEwn2

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 10, 2021

read mattys hungarian nationalism piece, shockingly lazy writing even for him, good work if you can get it i guess

I think there's a genuine conflict in life between good politics, which necessarily emphasizes structural factors and the importance of social change, and good advice (or good teaching or good therapy etc.) which emphasizes internal locus of control and making the best of things. https://t.co/IynWIGd6dN

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 13, 2021

I think there was an ilx thread specifically about this tension Yglesias observes here, but I can't find it, does anyone remember?

like the bit in the Black Stuff where Bernard Hill tells Michael Angelis that he hates him because he's "too nice" - that being content with your lot is more likely to make you happy, even a better person, but Yosser is still right to be furious and bitter even though it doesn't do him or anyone else any good

i vaguely remember a thread/discussion but i'm not sure what it was or if it's the same one you're thinking. unhelpful, i know. this quote from the fake therapist is such a strawman though.

also shocked to see a bad faith essay from Sally Satel is a psychiatrist who works at a methadone clinic in Washington, D.C., a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a visiting professor at Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, who is bothered by some therapists having politics she doesn't like instead of her politics, which are normal and neutral and in no way make it into her practice. like i would be bothered to hear a therapist say some of the things she's talking about, but i also would not visit one who works at AEI, because her philosophy is likely way incompatible with mine. so what? a couple times i have googled people saying racist or otherwise bad things on nextdoor and found that they were psychiatrists or therapists. why would one want to see them?

i think it was maybe the elitism thread

have to say big media matt's been on a righteous (and basically correct) anti-blob twitter-tear abt afghanistan for the last couple of days

"fool me once" i guess -- he was bad on iraq at the very very start (when he was still baacially a student) but also good on why and how he'd been so wrong

(this is not an endorsement of the many many things he's annoying and wrong about)

I've never heard that expression "the blob" before used in the way Matty is using it. Is it basically a new term for "military-industrial complex"?

Sort of, I think of it more as the think tank/natsec bureaucracy complex.

this is the first time I remember it being used, coming from an Obama guy so grains of salt, etc.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/magazine/the-aspiring-novelist-who-became-obamas-foreign-policy-guru.html

not that new: as milo says obama aide ben rhodes famously used it in 2016 -- more of the foreign policy establishment than the MIC -- but it's been a more general term of dismissive impatience for self-interested bureaucracies since the 80s

(in the uk michael gove used it of the educational establishment in the early teens)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/05/07/blob-abides

This weekend will be the four-year anniversary of “the Blob” entering public discourse with respect to America’s foreign policy community. The term emerged from a New York Times Magazine profile of Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama’s foreign policy amanuensis. According to Rhodes’s account in the story, “the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.”

The term soon became omnipresent in foreign policy discussions as its definition expanded in scope. It came to mean the foreign policy “establishment” that included those working in government, think tanks, and academia. Four years later, the term, like “globalization” or “neoliberalism” or “populist” or “elite,” tends to obscure as much as it reveals.

OK, so I guess it seems to be more along the lines of "hawks", ie those who believe the US needs to project dominance for its own sake internationally.

I guess typical of Matty that he's doubling down on his take that Biden basically made the right call despite everything that's happened.

^ a member of Team Stay Forever