EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

feel like ezra is a more likable and otm but matt is a deeper thinker so i dunno

yglesias has been annoying the fucc out of me

strikes me as the kind of guy who would have been a member of 'the best and brightest' or whatever

yeah thats his exact flaw, i mean he supported the iraq war via absurd over thinking, still i have to admit he has influenced my thinking on such topics as urban planning and destroying the senate

i dumped yg from my read a while ago. i guess that's sort of 'mcnabb off my madden team' but there u go. mainstream dem-liberal technocrats aren't thin on the ground and he's a shitty writer imo. i still 'like' him i guess but i stopped enjoying his writing like at all.

however i do get into quasi-arguments about urban planning fairly frequently (and no not just on ilx) and i find myself mimicking yglesian points

who has better trolls?

i feel like yglesias is still sort of confused by irl

"from my reader" i mean

i must admit the truly sad number of typos were a big part of me ignoring his blog.

plus i figure the shit he talks about is so everywhere that other ppl will link to him if it's really worth it (see also: andrew sullivan)

both of these guys are nearly worthless on culture

they used to live in a house with dave weigel and spencer ackerman, bet it was a terrible place to hang out

haa i find the typos charming because a. its p 'internet' b. i am myself as you all know a masterful typo maker

see i figured you as an accomplished and rigorous stylist whereas our think tank opinion leader is just fucking lazy and/or dyslexic

shouldnt this be in ILM

they used to live in a house with dave weigel and spencer ackerman, bet it was a terrible place to hang out

― max, Monday, January 3, 2011 12:55 PM (28 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

that there is an offline culture of young dc bloggers and i know abt it is simultaneously fascinating and horrifying, although i was unaware of this particular amazing roommates based nugget, would love to run into these guys at a bbq and get into a drunken political argument

see i figured you as an accomplished and rigorous stylist whereas our think tank opinion leader is just fucking lazy and/or dyslexic

― goole, Monday, January 3, 2011 12:58 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ty 4 yr support

ackerman talks about that time the most; i did not know weigel was one of them. feel a little weird for knowing about this crap tbh.

i dont really read attackerman, his shtick grates

he's done with FDL if that helps

i dunno if i've come clean about this but i have a war-nerd streak so

ackerman talks about that time the most; i did not know weigel was one of them. feel a little weird for knowing about this crap tbh.

― goole, Monday, January 3, 2011 1:01 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

me too but on the other hand did u know that ezra klein became a health care reform expert to impress simon schamas daughter chloe

no i was unaware. she must be pretty fine.

i think i find the stuff he covers interesting, but i guess i dont really, i read him occasionally at wired xp re ackerman

lol max whatre u talkin abt

haha i have been under the impression that i knew a lot of gossip abt these ppl but now that i am thinking about it the thing about chloe schama is the only gossip-y nugget i know, kind of disappointed in myself

http://grab.by/8b5N

anyway when i saw ezra klein on tv i was surprised his persona seemed more journalistic glory days upstart young reporter than coddled nerdface technocratic blogger - i liked him

he has an early 80s newspaper look and feel to him

Yglesias has been wrong many times.

Klein meanwhile is a duller writer but his steady crunching of numbers is ultimately educational.

yglesiases willingness to be ambitious and wrong is imo what makes him compelling - like i understand theres danger in utopian thinking but still reimagining the world and its institutions is def one of my hobbies

who has better trolls?

― goole, Monday, January 3, 2011 11:51 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

to answer my own q, i don't really know. klein's comments are pretty boring but i have noticed yglesias' "community" to be especially vicious and repetitive. neither of them seem to really care much but i think both have made gestures to get more involved. terrible drudgery, sounds like, to me.

as far as blogger gossip goes, can anyone verify that there are, in fact, paid trolls out there? i'd hate to think it was mere dedication causing the same people to say the same things in the same place every day

theres only one blog i can think of that has good comments, really feel like 'comments off' should be the default

TNC i assume?

your bløg has good comments joe

yah tnc and lol of course goes w/o saying my blog

btw how much does this trolling gig pay, who do i contact

i know, right

i saw an interview w/yglesias where he was like all my readers really hate me i have no idea why they come to my blog

he was k funny tbh

eh i've watched a few of his bloggingheads's and he comes off like a jerk imo, interrupting, going on and on

ha yeah ive never been able to bring myself to watch a blogginghead and in general id much rather read than watch any news type thing but for some reason i saw this it was a friendly interview at a like blogg convention where they we just joking around

anyway my head says klein but my heart goes yglesias, not sure what to do, prob follow my heart

yglesias is good on urban issues - not that he says anything new, but at least he's talking to relatively wide audience. but still...super annoying on a personal level. I like klein.

Yglesias is a philosophy major in every word he writes and this is awesome about him.

ugh this is gonna be like that week i read glenn greenwald isnt it

neither of these guys is much like glenn greenwald

unless you have some sort of distaste for american journalists, then yes it'll be like that lol

these guys are on the sensible/technocratic side of the great progressive blogger divide - greenwald exists on the polemic/activist shore - which is not to say hes any more or less otm, just that hes harder to take

god i need to never open this thread again

I don't see why fellatio is the problem.

giving pleasure is sacred, but there's just certain things you shouldn't do for cops, republicans, or billionaires

CPR

Sex work is work

Now that Platner has *already won the nomination* I think it would be in his interest to stop being used as a tool by factional players (no more interviews with David Sirota etc) and focus on broadly agreeable partisanship but that's the luxury of having won early.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) May 27, 2026

Please talk to me, Graham.

focus on broadly agreeable partisanship

agreeable = acceptable to our monied, powerful overlords

I watched some of Klein's latest podcast on YouTube; he's talking to a Republican political consultant about the upcoming midterms, and he (Klein) said this:

"I always feel like you could imagine a Trump administration, second term, that sealed the border but didn't do the aggressive internal ICE and CBP enforcements, so you didn't have things like the battle of Minnesota, that did not, say, go to war in Iran, that did not do the tariffs, and could then draft on what was a fairly strong and certainly well-recovering economy coming out of Biden, and getting a bunch of AI investment, and doesn't make a bunch of what seem to me to be errors, and maybe is in a really different place."

He's still doing this. Ten years in, he's still doing "If only Donald Trump was a completely different person, maybe things would be different." I mean, do they smash him in the forehead with a brick every morning?

Yeah, weird. We really would be in a different place.

If we just imagine erasing all the most important policies and actions of this administration which I just named, then all we'd have left is DOGE, the destruction of the civil service and CDC, the rush to gerrymander minority representation out of existence, the normalization of corruption on a vast scale, and one other thing. So, then everything would be fine, really.

I mean, I listened to part of that podcast, too, and Klein is clearly using that as a hypothetical to point out how much of the unpopularity of Trump's second term is of the administration's own making. I don't get the impression that he is surprised by what has happened or expected anything different.

Did Klein also make the hypothetical point that, if his granny had wheels, she'd be a bicycle?

I mean, I listened to part of that podcast, too, and Klein is clearly using that as a hypothetical to point out how much of the unpopularity of Trump's second term is of the administration's own making. I don't get the impression that he is surprised by what has happened or expected anything different.

You're giving him way too much credit. I mean, I quoted his exact words. "I always feel like you could imagine a Trump administration..." BASED ON WHAT? The problem Klein has - the problem a lot of political commentators have - is that they cannot admit that the voters are morons and bigots, and that they have elected a moron and bigot to represent them. If someone is president, they must axiomatically be deserving of the office, so it's the pundit's responsibility to rationalize it until it makes sense. Donald Trump is president, therefore he must be presidential. And if you keep saying it over and over, eventually it'll become true.

Pundits "imagined" this back in 2016, after Trump won--that he would somehow govern as a moderate (because he was from New York!) and just do popular things like infrastructure and blah blah blah. It's telling that Klein never abandoned that, but it is seemingly the job of newspaper columnists to give dipshit advice to politicians.

for me the telling part of that quote is more when he says "what seem to me to be errors" than the making up a guy to be glad he's president about

like even when he's thinking about the actual trump, he's classifying tariffs, ICE, and starting a war as goofs

unperson otm above

well, he was talking with a republican political consultant. this may have been his way of tacitly signalling that he is a sympathetic interviewer who is safe for republican DC insiders, so they'll keep accepting his invitations to be interviewed. after all, punditry podcasting is a harsh mistress, always demanding fresh meat on the altar.

surely he's doing a goofy attempt to meet the republican consultant interviewee halfway. the problem is that you can't pretend a national-level republican is anything other than in the bag for trump, because none of them are consistently critical of him. if Klein was a Chotiner, he could use that kind of hypothetical to lay a trap to get someone to admit that, but that's not his style

I am going to award one of my rare "Aimless otm"s in this case

Yglesias has always been a contemptible troll, but for a long time I was generally willing to give EK’s centrist musings the benefit of the doubt. After watching his dumb cow eyes glaze over when interviewing TN-C a couple of years ago re Palestine I realized that there’s just nothing there. Probably never was.

I think a lot of what people don't like about him comes down to his rhetorical style, which is fine. I have less patience for it these days myself. I just don't think he's as much of an idiot as you guys do.

I don't think he's an idiot. I do think he's not sure himself of what he really believes in and cares about — beyond a generalized sense that everybody should just be "reasonable," without really examining how he defines that. So when he has more left-leaning guests on, he can seem ideologically sympathetic to them, because he probably is to some degree. But then he gets centrists/right-wingers on, and his impulse is the same.

Yglesias on the other hand is obviously an actual idiot.

whos the bigger idiot, depends on what you mean by idiot

Fair.

I do think he's not sure himself of what he really believes in and cares about — beyond a generalized sense that everybody should just be "reasonable," without really examining how he defines that.

going to be the one who says it, but in our current epoch, this makes you an idiot and a useless fucking melt.

(not you, tipsy, but EK)

someone is going to have to define "melt" for me. i think i get it through context, but it's one of those words I've seen thrown around as a pejorative without quite understanding it.

The younger Biden administration guys read Klein, they still do. So do #resistancelibs associated with Biden and whatever you call the Dem power establishment. I don't care for any of these people nor what they think the future of the party should be.

The "abundance" stuff looks like a farrago now.

The people pushing the "abundance" message (it's much too vague to be an agenda) seem to have no experience of a functional political party. I hate to say it, but back in the 90s when Sen. Proxmire (D-WIS) finally shamed Congress into abandoning vote-trading, based around so-called 'pork barrel' appropriations, he broke the mainspring that drove the entire process of passing legislation.

Abundance was always a joke, and it felt especially feeble arriving at the start of Trump 2.0. Just insanely out of touch with the world.

going to be the one who says it, but in our current epoch, this makes you an idiot and a useless fucking melt.

Yeah, Klein is definitely an American iteration of a melt.

the politics expert weighs in

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:yjl44ckrkaif35o6jfl767vp/bafkreidt2233oubc7tx4tctwxp7ahjn3iplxcykcsf4hoppgbip6esmwqy

oh give me a break will

what a thirsty dunce

kind of missed the part where "a meme around an issue the public only loosely understands" is basically how mass sentiment works and most movements don't immaculately pop into the world as a clearly defined thing. the inability to understand this is pretty much his entire shtick

i read some of his other posts about this and he was like why are people mad at data centers when other things are worse, being against a bad thing is not sufficient you must be against the worst thing first as determined by stancilmetric rank system

one of his examples of an industry that uses a lot of resources was farming lol apparently not taking into account that it produces the food people need to survive while no one needs ai and in fact many people actively do not want it, what a dumb bitch man truly

cannibalizing my own social media posts here but: how depressing is the first "unused data center is now an ICE detainment center" or vice versa headline going to be?

the companies that are building both on contract for the government/cloud companies really don't care. it's all property and asset management to them

I don't know anything about this human meme, is he a climate change denier or something? what kind of disaster is he waiting for before he decides against 5000 new data centres?

kind of missed the part where "a meme around an issue the public only loosely understands" is basically how mass sentiment works and most movements don't immaculately pop into the world as a clearly defined thing. the inability to understand this is pretty much his entire shtick

the weird thing is that I think he *does* understand it. he's always banging on about how people's perceptions of politics are informed by media narratives. i think he adopts this faux-naive tone as a way of pointing out gaps between perception and reality, but it comes off as supercilious.

reality is when you have a chart perception is everything else

Taylor Lorenz has also been posting about the anti-data center movement being an uninformed panic.

Shrill Pantsful

who was it who wrote about how the desire to be "savvy" is why pundits are often so useless?

Taylor Lorenz is also repeatedly posting about how her subscriber numbers are going down

imo politics and journalism are both venues where the ability to synthesize statistical data and hard facts with public sentiment and general understanding are what help you succeed and it's weird to position yourself in that space and abdicate the responsibility of trying to figure out why or how people have opinions

answering myself: Jay Rosen, https://pressthink.org/2011/08/why-political-coverage-is-broken/

though he was talking about political reporters, so this isn't quite the same thing but I think a lot of pundits end up in the same boat

good article, rob