EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

ah yeah the ezra klein interview was probably too intricate

that shor guy is such an obvious fraud my sophisticated computer projections 12 years out into the future that tell me that democrats should run on popular things and by that i mean target swing voters lmao, i mean god bless ezra for pushing back a little bit i guess but it was funny to see twitter described as the dem echo chamber because it is very much not! in fact the dem establishment is quite obviously being exposed to ideas that disturb them on twitter, as evidenced by attempting to blame defund the police, a position which effectively zero dem politicians have endorsed blamed for future electoral failures

the real dem establishment shines through the article in its unexamined assumptions about the primacy of above all else targeted messaging in winning elections, that the point of winning elections is to win more elections, and of course total lack of refection on the actual governing democrats do and how that might contribute to how people feel about them, i mean if this guy were just a campaign worker talking to other campaign workers fine but the dem establishment and many rank and file dem hobbyists very much have 24/7 campaign worker brain

another kind of funny tell that shor is processing washington consensus through algorithms is the total absence of the big recent novel trend in the polling, which is of course the huge generational divide! the likes of which weve not seen since before we started tracking that sort of thing

ezras momentary grappling with the intricacies of class was pretty painful too, his conclusion that if you are a white millionaire who drives a pickup truck you are the same as a poor white guy who also has a pickup truck because you both voted for trump i think is prob pretty much liberal consensus, shows how alienated our politics are from any real class analysis, which is of course super fine with powerful people across the political spectrum

i do agree that hillary would have won if she had gotten strongly behind even just one popular policy, like if instead of saying that economists favor raising the minimum wage to $12 she had run around the country saying fuck it you all deserve $15 an hour, and not just because its a popular galvanizing policy but because it wouldve shown that she was capable of standing for anything at all, but of course she was not

also interesting that the consensus around obamas big win has become that he was simply incredibly talented, the fact that he ran on HOPE and CHANGE is maybe too painful to reflect upon

wait I feel like i agree with all the stuff you just said but also am not sure how it pertains to ezra klein

hes one of them man, lol occurs to me hes kind of the david brooks of centrists

yglesias is bill kristol

ahhh lmao ilx undefeated

https://i.imgur.com/6ngjErV.png

hes one of them man, lol occurs to me hes kind of the david brooks of centrists

― lag∞n, Saturday, October 9, 2021 9:59 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I guess I thought that David Brooks was the David Brooks of centrists.

I think Klein is temperamentally similar to someone like Brooks or an NPR commentator or whatever. He seems to place a virtue on seeming reasonable and open-minded, and he occasionally invites someone on the podcast with whom he disagrees politically but believes is making their arguments in good faith (like Ross Douthat or, indeed, Tyler Cowen, whose libertarianism was pointedly brought up and critiqued by Klein on the podcast, so I don't know how much your friend was actually paying attention).

Politically, however, he feels to me more simpatico with Jamelle Bouie or Brian Beutler or the folks writing for The New Republic these days. He's fundamentally earnest, so he's not going to take on the sarcastic edge of someone like Alex Pareene, but with that earnestness comes a streak of righteous anger and moral clarity about certain issues, like expanding the social-welfare state and strengthening democracy.

At the end of the day, he's someone who is paid handsomely to pontificate for the New York Times, so I get that he may come across as a foppish establishment type. But that's not really the impression I get from engaging with his work, at least over the past few years.

imo klein is pretty clearly to the right of the new republic staff which isnt to say there isnt some overlap in views, i think also hes fundamentally a technocrat, but we live in interesting times where even technocrats maybe be moved to moral indignation, i wont hold my breath for yglesias (sociopathy)

also brooks is most certainly a conservative, but hes a conservative for centrists, which is to say his job is to apologize for republican horrors

also brooks is most certainly a conservative, but hes a conservative for centrists, which is to say his job is to apologize for republican horrors

otm

Klein is most certainly a technocrat first, and even when he argues in good faith he can't help sounding like a pundit for whom the risk of enacting social policies benefiting the people who don't read him scares him more than explaining over tweets or podcast how these policies would look.

wish we could have a safe space wonk thread where we could talk abt pollsters and bloggers without fear of bullying from lag∞n :P

1. i have no problem with polling or blogging, in fact i like both

2. lack of bullying is one of the things that has allowed technocracy to flourish, something is deeply wrong with a society where mathew yglesias has such elevated self esteem

3. if you started a technocrat thread i would probably never find it

i for one only read these revives if lag00n is involved in them

xp- milo and julio would find it tho

since i did start this thread i feel i have a duty to patrol it

another kind of funny tell that shor is processing washington consensus through algorithms is the total absence of the big recent novel trend in the polling, which is of course the huge generational divide! the likes of which weve not seen since before we started tracking that sort of thing

that's the core of his argument actually. young white people disproportional shifted to the left in the last 5 years relative to any other demographic group -> those ppl are disproportionately dem staffers and disproportionately live in liberal cities (where their votes weigh zero at the margin in the senate) -> democrats increasingly out of touch on which issues are popular

idk i just read the ezra article and it didnt mention the generation gap, also its not just white yuppies who have shifted left its true across races, geographies etc; feel like pollsters have gotten so used to slicing and dicing for soccer moms and whatnot theyve somehow missed this big ass shift or just dont know how to deal with it cause their models are so overfit

which is not to say the dem elite arent out of touch but being too liberal is not really their problem lol

i mean legal weed medicare for all raising the federal minimum wage eliminating the filibuster are all popular things that are considered insanely leftist by at least a good chunk of the dem establishment

his argument is basically that politicians should talk more about popular economic policy stuff but try to avoid talking about social issues and immigration. in one interview i read with him he said the reason bernie did so well in 2016 was because he ran economic populist and socially moderate (iirc he also said bernie would have won in that interview lol). which was the inverse of hilary's priority in talking points, shifting to the left on social issues while staying moderate on economics

imo a good criticisms of popularism is that, on some level hilary clinton's team were doing exactly what it prescribes: polling and focus-grouping every issue and prioritizing things that polled well. the problem is (1) their polls were subject to the same non-response bias that made all polls so inaccurate in 2016, and (2) they were plagued by her life-time of earnest shilling unpopular policies. a recording of hillary saying "My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders" to a room full of bankers leaked in october 2016. you can't find any recording or bernie ever saying anything like that

This cleaving of "issues" into "political" and "social" remains the commentariat's most grievous sin. Fuck them.

i mean i was just being reductive by grouping them that way to make analogy to 2016, there are unpopular 'economic' talking points and popular 'social' issues ones. but the popularist idea is that you talk about the popular ones and not the unpopular ones

oh to be clear flopson I wasn't attacking you; it's the way these choads think.

no worries, just wanted to clarify the pt i was making didn't really hinge on the distinction. because you can dis-aggregate issues and messages beyond that (admittedly dubious) binary

the thing this guys needs to understand is the reason dems dont do popular economic things is because they dont want to

Is this being presented as an either/or? Because couldn't you easily have both? pic.twitter.com/pnByQX0FVx

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) October 10, 2021

wow @ that shor tweet

Better dead than red

more like david whore (for us imperialism)

So people are still doing the parentheses, huh

the thing this guys needs to understand is the reason dems dont do popular economic things is because they dont want to

― lag∞n, Sunday, October 10, 2021 5:58 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

i would like to add and they dont care about winning

right so the evidence here is that the polls showed people were content and didn't want much to change throughout the period between 1979 and 2021 https://t.co/lr1nAQPez0

— 'Weird Alex' Pareene (@pareene) October 12, 2021

73 to 90 percent of people answered the phone and told a stranger that things were going ok

"How's it going?"

"Uh, okay."

"Thanks for your input!"

love to use a poll about peoples personal lives to make some sort of... point?

https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/2yo3s2hrses7xszxbbjsla.png

if Matthew Yglesias called to ask me a question for a poll I'd hang up and call the NSA.

i know there are ppl here who like him but over and over he shows himself to be incompetent and i don't get it. i mean there are reliable statistics available that indicate whether things are or are not going well for people, that would not require them to respond to a survey. many people who are not doing well in a material sense might also say they don't want things to change, and there are interesting things to be said about this phenomenon but nah, people are just "contented" and "change averse." it's their nature as americans, couldn't be that it's a very common way of handling immiseration.

he is so lazy ive read a couple of his substacks and i really just couldnt believe what i was seeing, good work if you can get it i guess

one billion americans, though. who else is thinking that big

me, check this out: two billion americans

spitting at the sight of this

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FClY0nsXMAcZufL?format=jpg&name=large

what?

— Sir Loin of Beef (@SotoAlfred) October 25, 2021

Waiting for a politician to have a Soulja Boy moment

in these challenging times for our nation im calling upon president biden to step up and superman that hoe

lol

My theory is that white folks try to tattletale to the media employers of black folks (like Matty Yce tried it on me last week) on the theory that the white people in charge honestly don't know what the Negroes are running around saying.

— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) October 29, 2021

tried to figure out what happened but matty has his tweets on auto delete

i tried https://polititweet.org/figure?account=15446531 but don't want to spend time on it, you might