EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

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

Nothing lasts forever.

I don’t think making it a synonym of hawks or neolibs is accurate, really - the blob is imperialism by bureaucratic inertia and tradition rather than clearly defined goals.

well of course MY always doubles down, right or wrong, but the argument that it had to be done this way (fast and chaotic) and not e.g. well organised and drawn out with ordered contingencies in place -- bcz the slow and steady way wd certainly have been stalled and derailed by the blob -- is his argument, yes; less defend biden at all costs than identify the forces arrayed against withdrawal and identify what needed to be done to defeat them

josh marshall more or less agrees: another surprising lib centrist in the "fool me once" space

Hindsight is 20/20, but I don't buy that this was the only other option besides a generations-long, semi-permanent deployment of US troops in Afghanistan. A few weeks ago I wonder what odds Biden would've given that this would be how it would play out. If he thought there was even a 5% chance it would happen this way, I think he was irresponsible to proceed as he did. If he thought it was less than that, then I guess it was a failure of intelligence.

i think they call it "the blob" because it represents a neoliberal sort of pro-interventionist "conventional wisdom" that transcends party and ideology. the traditional divisions (gop vs. dem, etc.) don't apply.

The time for a long orderly withdrawal and acceptance of defeat was 2010 at the latest.

iirc one of the examples of the Blob that Ben Rhodes used was all the Saudi money going into DC thinktanks producing all of these anti-Iran pundits and "intellectuals"

Ross Douthat has penned the most incendiary anti-blob screed I've seen yet:

Our botched withdrawal is the punctuation mark on a general catastrophe, a failure so broad that it should demand purges in the Pentagon, the shamed retirement of innumerable hawkish talking heads, the razing of various NGOs and international-studies programs and the dissolution of countless consultancies and military contractors.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/31/opinion/afghanistan-biden.html

based ross

The worst person you know just etc etc

man ross needs to chill if he wants to be invited back to aspen

Since this is kind of the blob commentary thread now

Lay off and give the Blob some mulligans. pic.twitter.com/64qSWz3Sqd

— Daniel Denvir (@DanielDenvir) September 2, 2021

just noting -- since i mentioned him upthread -- that we just got a powerful shitposter's "let's be frank: laws are made up" from josh marshall lol: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/scotus-delenda-est

(ugh i hate it when it does that)

Ezra had Robert Wright on his podcast to talk about the blob

https://i.imgur.com/sSLp1cp.png

I will basically turn in my dirtbag card at this point and say ezra is Good. I usually like his podcasts (the ones I choose to listen to)

I feel like this current act of his career allows him to be chiller and read more cool books and I definitely think he’s moved to the left

About 5 years ago Hayes wrote something for the Nation I disagreed with (in part) so I wrote him a brief & somewhat unfriendly email telling him as much. He replied with about a thousand words thoughtfully explaining himself to me when he had no obligation to do so, and he did as if he were having a conversation with one of his colleagues or someone he respected and not some random butthurt internet dude. Our politics are basically the same but I would be Team Hayes even if they weren't.

― All kinds of heinous things, Friday, December 28, 2012 12:11 AM (eight years ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is incredible btw and hates is the Only Good Cable News Guy. I loved his new yorker essay a couple weeks ago tho personally I would have edited out the trump stuff

hayes*

im still #TeamYglesias but i liked Ezra’s piece on David Shor this week, particularly how it gave a pretty thorough airing of the critical perspectives on popularism. most of the interviews with shor so far have been with people who just agree with him fully (like eric levitz, noah smith or matt yglesias) so it was nice to see some thoughtful pushback

i get a slightly manic vibe from Chris Hayes

I need to read that, I started it and then realized how long it was and I was already in the middle of a couple of other long things

in complete agreement with basically everything k3vin said here! i have some shame about enjoying ezra's podcast but he's a good interviewer and has a very curious mind