EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

Have to admit, Matty's gotten better at the throwaway joke:

In addition to turnout, the big question in Virginia is which candidate do the voters vote for.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) November 2, 2021

Is this what the kids call a shitpost?

Revolting little cockroach

She would never do it, but easy opportunity here for Kamala Harris to say the SF DAs office was better when she was running it and become more popular.https://t.co/fjkW8MAYBA

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) November 9, 2021

I have no idea — maybe the way she ran the office was terrible and all of his changes have been for the better. But my guess is that *she* doesn’t think it was terrible, and it would improve her public image to make a public case for her way.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) November 10, 2021

the Real America expert has logged on

One thing I think you see here is that writers who live in New York City tend to underestimate the life of material abundance enjoyed by the typical person who living outside a high-cost metro and working in a more normal industry. https://t.co/ca1fd8zZgn

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) November 12, 2021

The central funny/infuriating thing about this bit of would-be reverse snobbery is Yglesias was raised on velvet cushions inside a vitrine in New York City and Hamilton hails from Shithole, Fla. https://t.co/5jKsWs7d86

— Tom Scocca (@tomscocca) November 12, 2021

The rough draft lyrics of “Walk On The Wild Side” needed some work.

I'm a fan of @mattyglesias' creativity on twitter.

— Ronald Klain (@WHCOS) December 3, 2021

fireable offense

it's like watching a kid make a sculpture out of dog poop

I don’t think the American left is going to get far until it can acknowledge that average living standards in this country are actually very high, and that’s the appropriate context in which to think about specific problems. https://t.co/Ma7JhPZD81

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) December 6, 2021

This stupid motherfucker.

1 admit living standards are high
2 ???
3 profit

never think about specific problems like such as "this post doesn't even say the thing i'm responding to and my substack subscribers don't care"

you know, in roman times they didn’t even have iphones

this pareene essay from a few years ago is more or less a nice rebuttal to that way of thinking

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/consolation-prizes-pareene

1 admit living standards are high
2 ???
3 profit

This is the key thing with him, at least as far as his Twitter presence goes - it’s hard to say he’s wrong, per se, as he’s too glib and vague for it to be clear what he’s actually arguing or what he would do differently.

You could spin out a wonk take that exaggeration of the US’ problems makes them seem more intractable than they might actually be, or that it makes middle-income voters who are doing ok think you’re alarmist, or encourages the tendency to pull up drawbridges…but he’s too lazy to do anything other than point to a graph and say ‘ah, seems like you might be incorrect’.

in lieu of a better thread

I just assumed that American teachers discovered they like working at home and burnout was a device to allow them to do so.

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) December 8, 2021

You try teaching a bunch of first graders over zoom, Ms. McArdle. Remember, if any of them fail to learn the curriculum, it's YOUR FAULT.

really the worst xp

she's so consistently a moron about everything

meggy mcglesias

I think pretty much everyone who has had the option of working from home has discovered that it has some pretty nice side benefits. Wouldn't be surprised if the same was true for teachers.

no. nate

the three teachers I know well couldn't stand it and said it was the worst year of their career

as a parent, having to endure the cacophony of 30 elementary kids on zoom was terrible even for a few minutes

I dont know maybe teachers are the one group of people in the world who don't like sleeping in and saving an hour or more of commute time every day.

says the man who has never discussed his hypothesis with a teacher

So if teachers hate ZOOM so much how does having more ZOOM help burnout?

it doesn't

megan makes matt look normal

I taught college students over Zoom for two semesters. Not the same experience as teaching kids obv, and while I didn't loathe it I would never do it again unless compelled to.

my friend that taught special ed was depressed all year, it just didn't work and the kids were all from a pretty low income urban district, he just started losing kids as it went on, they had so many technical difficulties because it was hard for some of them

I dont know maybe teachers are the one group of people in the world who don't like sleeping in and saving an hour or more of commute time every day.

In exchange for having to corral 30 children and listen to them scream over your iMac speakers all day.

It's a bit different if your WFH experience is a couple of zoom meetings with adults and typing in Excel while you listen to podcasts.

are we really have this convo based on a mcardle tweet???

now the convo is based more on o. nate's posts. megan's idiot tweet was just the catalyst.

rob
Posted: December 9, 2021 at 3:51:26 PM
are we really have this convo based on a mcardle tweet???

see what these freaks do to us

Yeah, I would say, *I* like working from home way more than my friends who are teachers like working from home. Among people I know, teachers are among those who like it least.

You could spin out a wonk take that exaggeration of the US’ problems makes them seem more intractable than they might actually be
― Scampo di tutti i Scampi (ShariVari), Monday, December 6, 2021 8:39 AM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

I believe this is absolutely the case, alarmist media (mainstream or social) tend to overlook how well americans have it compared to the rest of the world. Any acknowledgement of that fact only gets you scorn from populists.

the original quoted tweet was not about income and that, among his other bad qualities, is why he was scorned and will continue to be scorned unless he shapes up

When it comes to many things outside of standards of living metrics, say stuff like quality of life and civil rights, US remains one of the best countries to live in. Not saying there isn’t room for improvement, there is obviously much to work on. But if the US is a dystopia, what is the DRC?

in terms of quality of life and civil rights, the US is certainly in the top four of the four countries i've lived in, it's true.

Ah, the old "well you could live in Ethiopia during the famine, quitcherbitchin"

this is so pointless to argue about. literally a 2 a.m. throwaway tweet.

haha i just read what megan mggargle was responding to. it's hard to understand what burnout is when you've never had a real job. it's not "having the hardest job," ffs

Ah, the old "well you could live in Ethiopia during the famine, quitcherbitchin"

― papal hotwife (milo z), Thursday, December 9, 2021 5:38 PM (thirty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Not saying there isn’t room for improvement, there is obviously much to work on.

Mcardle obviously not worth responding to, the whole exchange mainly highlights goldfish-brain in media. It was less than five years ago that K-12 educators throughout the country engaged in mass labor action around the decade-long perpetuation of 2008 austerity policies. There’s also been a notable backlash from teachers against the neoliberal/charterization policy that both parties have embraced since the 90s, and the Democratic Party has attempted to distance itself from some of Obama’s trademark ed policies.

This is pretty relevant context! The idea that schoolworkers mysteriously started acting out because of the pandemic just shows media folks’ total inability to focus on anything other than the shiny object in front of them.

US rates considerably higher in terms of quality of life and civil rights in the imagination of both its population and (crucially) the world population than it does in reality, thinking ppl underrate it on those counts is prime evidence of living in a bubble.

Yes, the US is not ‘the greatest place on earth’ like some republicans will want you to believe. Yes, there’s a (relatively small) bunch of countries that offer better of qualify of life to its citizens. But the gap is so large with so many of the other countries that cries of misery or dystopia rings extremely out of touch with reality.

did you know that the united states has the largest prison population and that its police kill and abuse with impunity

responding to someone saying that the usa has many dystopian qualities by pointing out that it has a relatively high standard of living is not only a non sequitur its also you know uh possessing many of the qualities typically associated with sociopathy

its also as far as the political geniuses like matty go just not a good political argument, reminiscent of hillary gift shops america is already great hat, check out the country wrong track polling number if you dont belive me, also just check out the country lol