intimate-mirror:

max1461:

I am interested. Elaborate (I know very little about Matt Yglesias).

he makes a lot of posts like “it is good for police to catch thieves” which are uncontroversial among the general public but make some tweeters very angry and try to denounce him as fascist for it

i’m not sure why he does it so much if not some meta-contrarian urge

The cloud of discoursers that gathers about him has disproportionate shares of both quality and absurd members, doing this periodically prompts the latter to identify themselves as such which is useful for the impact on the former, really.

eightyonekilograms:

I know I’ve posted about this before, but seriously: what is it about Matt Yglesias? The dude mostly just posts mundane, obviously-correct center-left takes all day long, but there’s this segment of the Pundit Class who is convinced that he’s Satan von SuperHitler.

He takes the Clinton ‘90s as the refoundation of the Democratic Party seriously.

>see a new picture of Matt Yglesias

>think “he looks like a Miami dentist”

>realize you really mean “Cuban Jewish man in his 40s”

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I love that the two things Matt Yglesias is unreservedly enthusiastic about are powder cocaine and the geriatric spice, melange.

Matt Yglesias’ in his substack just repeatedly giving sympathetic, even defensive analyses of what he sees as errors in media-political positioning and consistently illustrating them in unmentioned passing with David Roberts tweets is my favorite troll going

As Matt Yglesias leans more into movie takes for flavor, I do appreciate how they definitely come from the son of a credited screenwriter

aorish-deactivated20251222:

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

bogleech:

pissvortex:

daughter-of-sapph0:

xbuster:

radiofreederry:

Matt Walsh doesn’t like the idea of teaching children about consent, for some reason

I wonder why

this is the guy terfs idolize and is best friends with jkr btw

Genuinely why do so many innocent people get murdered in random shootings but nobody has ever just run up and stabbed this guy in the eye socket? Yeah I know chuds will try to martyr him but that’s still worth a world where he’s a corpse.

Would you? Why or why not? Other people also face those constraints, though they may not highlight them in their online presence.

Would be fucking hilarious if the mental-health, self-care, intervention-before-crisis thing was what doomed you in the end.

Personally I don’t see much utility in killing a boogeyman. It’s great having this guy be a face of modern conservatism, it’s good for reducing voter turnout and shrinking the base. Doesn’t seem worth the effort to be mad at; there’s some kind of moron who believes anything, better to have a really creepy moron creating guilt by association for your political enemies.

Yeah I’m with Yglesias in saying “don’t you realize having this shit in wide circulation on Twitter makes people notice and react against them?”

I actually first encountered Sailer in the comments of Yglesias’ ThinkProgress blog in the early 2000s

eightyonekilograms:

homoluigi:

urban-bike-cryptid-deactivated2:

eightyonekilograms:

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This sure explains a lot.

Is there anyone who has more details on this? I guess I’m out of touch because I’m not understanding the context of the tweets above.

I know very little insider stuff but Elon just bought Twitter and announced he’s going to start charging for blue checks. Journalists love their blue checks so I assume this is a tech vs journalism beef

Ok, so there are two things going on these tweets (you should really click through and read both mattyg’s thread and Kelsey’s response, they’re both good).

The first is the abrupt turn that happened in the mainstream press– but especially the New York Times, in the middle of the 2010s– towards very hostile coverage of all things tech. This was really frustrating, because while prior to that the coverage of tech was definitely too adulatory and a correction was needed, this has been way outside the bounds of good journalistic ethics for a while now. And I was on their side for a long time. I held out for a while, and continued to insist it wasn’t that bad, until that one week in 2020 when the NYT shat the bed like five times in the space of two weeks, with the piece on Scott, the thing with Taylor Lorenz and Marc Andreessen’s comments in Clubhouse (and I fucking hate that guy! do you know how bad you have to screw up to make me defend Marc Andreessen?!) and several more incidents in rapid succession.

And for a while I felt like I was going insane, because I couldn’t tell if this was all in my head or maybe it was all in the public interest and I had a biased opinion because of my job. But now Kelsey has confirmed that, no, there was an order from on high to do it this way, facts be damned. (A bunch of people in her replies are completely missing the point, accusing her of thinking “investigative reporting is bad’” No! Invesigative reporting is fine and necessary. Deciding in advance what the tone of a story will be, before you have any facts, and also banning ipso facto any kind of positive coverage, is not. That’s absurd.)

(If you’ve been reading my posts long enough that this attitude comes as a surprise, I should state that I am retracting this post. I believed it at the time, and then the situation just kept getting more and more ridiculous, and now we know why.)

The second bit is, as Matt says, that because a lot of leading figures in tech have gotten so annoyed at their treatment in the press recently, they’ve conjured up this theory about how journalists attach tons of status and self-worth to their blue check marks. And Matt is saying, no, this really isn’t true at all: the fact that journalists all get blue checks by default is more of an implementation quirk of Twitter and nobody really cares. I have no reason to doubt him on this. So what’s sort of funny is that apparently Elon got caught up in the same hatejerk as the rest of tech, and thought that “bluechecks” really did put tons of value on their verified status and could be extorted out of money for it. Which is probably a mistake, and one that’s going to cost him literally billions.

tl;dr we live in the stupid timeline, tech “thought leaders” and the journalists covering them are all awful

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I have, unironically, been saying that someone should note that the Bill Paxton’s Ass Extravaganza coincided with an uptick in honest-to-god interest in nonmonogamy and baugruppe-style multi-family compounds

Matt Yglesias talking about guns and gun control again, reflecting that he is in fact a native New Yorker with personal experience of the city being better at the end than the start of the Giuliani era, attributing a lot of that to what Bloomberg distilled in “Stop & Frisk”: if people face a reasonable chance of being personally searched for guns when they leave the house, they will stop carrying guns in public

I appreciate Matt Yglesias’ Letterboxd reviews because as the son of a produced feature screenwriter he brings fairly good insight on both the “what filmmakers are trying to do” and “how filmmaking affects the product” angles

I like how not just do cocaine and “the geriatric spice, melange” both have recurring roles in Matt Yglesias’ oeuvre, they’re kind of the same one

Framed as “wait… have we been digging our own grave here?” but yeah, good stuff

kontextmaschine:

Honestly its good there are still people struggling against the culture turn, still trying to insist harder on the 2010s, they’re gonna be a source of cheap wins to elevate the next wave

Matt Yglesias, by contrast, who’s already made it, is baiting everyone annoying to tie together the positions of COVID cowering and “detractor of Matt Yglesias”, so when politicians with a clue about politics are forced to jettison the former constituency the latter is wiped from any relevance too

Haters be like “all Matt Yglesias has going for him is a fine nose for shifts in the discourse that he’s always getting out in front of” in the course of drawing attention to how he’s recently shifted against them as part of building their own brands, and it’s like, did you really think this through?

Not enough attention paid to the fact that the Passionate Leftist critique of Matt Yglesias (that he’s a cynical opportunist who moves into and out of scenes and positions as their popularity waxes and wanes) and the Professional Progressive one (that he needs to “read the room” better) are directly opposed

My take is as the third generation of a writing dynasty that came out of midcentury NYC Communism he does, in fact, have a good sense of how to usefully advance his positions and interests by tailoring his efforts to the shifting correlation of forces in the discursive realm. That the Passionate Leftists are onto something, he is reading the room, and the Professional Progressives have just noticed him moving away from their consensus on that basis.

Someone should bring up Matt Yglesias’ old “in a scandal, just make it clear you won’t resign and the party you’re lashed to will have to back you up” strategy

When Vox formed I was like “well at least Klein is climbing the value ladder, fuck knows what Yglesias is up to”

But by not lashing himself to the brand and wielding his legacy he still gets to write explainers that are like “here’s how something now prominent ‘out of nowhere’ actually connects with many factors you might or should be aware of”

And not like “here’s how it proves your preconceptions were right all along”