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

Embrace the abundance agenda?

lol. stop trying to make this a thing. it's not a thing

also, wouldn't it be awesome if more red states had democratic congressmen whose policies were identical to republicans?

I gave up on finishing that column once I realized how long it was going to be, but for all those words he doesn't really have a lot to say or add to the conversation. I think he's fundamentally missing a lot of what's really going on, on both the left and right. And just even the idea that Democrats should run pro-life candidates is SO DUMB! Abortion bans aren't popular even in the states that have passed them! In polls in Texas, Florida, Tennessee, even Catholic Louisiana, legal abortion is routinely supported by more than 50 percent of people, sometimes close to 60 percent.

the dem establishment is so compromised its impossible for them to tell which way is up

not left not right the smell of your own farts

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:gz255fylitjq55pcmhrmzqkc/bafkreiaoi6rdpnfk5gjjg77w4ohplntzio6k3opyrpjlrdg45ganjmr4iq@jpeg

Pretty sure the historical fascist parties used to assert they were “neither left nor right.”

lmao

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DR2S7nfkXB9/?igsh=dmtmanRhZjQ4YmF2

Yglesias in NY Times . He reaches back to Obama and notes Obama had a policy of supporting all types of energy, and that Obama won in Ohio , therefore for Dems to win in 2026 they need to support oil and gas more. But Yglesias never spells out how that policy alone allegedly helped Obama win and or will help Dems in 2026 and lead voters in Ohio to switch to the Dems. He doesn’t address how Dems should market that message and if it is a big enough issue to get stay at home non-voters and right wing leaning voters to vote for Dems.

Liberals should support America’s oil and gas industry.
…
A realistic look at the Senate map makes it clear that Democrats’ hopes hinge on states that have important fossil fuel industries. A Democratic Party that is open to responsible stewardship of those states’ natural resources can win majorities and invest in solutions for tomorrow — just as Democratic governors in energy-producing states like New Mexico and Colorado have used oil and gas revenue to finance a goal of universal child care and historic upgrades to conservation and recreation on public lands.

The idea of states going blue or red for rational reasons feels very 20th century.

“Responsible “

yeah, Matty is imagining that politicians push policy buttons that light up voter preferences when that's just not how it works anymore (if it ever did). the problem is not that Dem politicians don't know how to appeal to conservative voters, it's that those voters can no longer imagine themselves ever voting for a Democrat, no matter what that Democrat says.

yep, and even if all that wasn't true the idea that what ails the dems is not enough support for the oil and gas industry is classic matty galaxy brain

In 2026 there will be voters who were 4 years old the last time Obama ran for president in Ohio. There will be at least a couple hundred thousand Ohio voters who moved away and several hundred thousand others who moved in since 2012. It's kinda hard to estimate just how many 2012 Ohio voters have died by now, but there are probably a lot. How does Matty see these affecting his perspective on Ohio's electorate in 2026?

Yglesias is arguing with NYT commenters by imagining a fake guy who agrees with all Yglesias's points. https://t.co/v2LL0Xatqp pic.twitter.com/ulmfPFjG79

— Joe Wrote (@joewrote) December 18, 2025

Yglesias is the David Brooks of his generation. Just utterly worthless, no actual beliefs, go die in a fire and get replaced by AI slop already.

Ezra is a different kind of clown I think, at least the bullshit he and his collaborators come up with don’t immediately seem like they were arrived at by playing with a spinny wheel

my brother swears he saw him at a suburban Maryland restaurant, surrounded by young men hanging on his every word.

Matty that is

surrounded by young men hanging on his every word

this paints such a sad picture for everyone involved

Maybe he'll get the Socrates treatment.

Matty that is

― Modollno Kahn (Boring, Maryland), Fr

"Matty, that is!"

https://i.imgur.com/YKDH4dP.jpg

Rep. Sean Casten tore apart Yglesias's fossil-fuel-humping NY Times op-ed on Bluesky this morning. Too long to cut 'n' paste the whole thing; it starts here:

https://bsky.app/profile/seancasten.bsky.social/post/3maghoicras2x

Hey it looks like we could hire Ezra Klein to speak at the next ILX Classic or Dud Roundtable for a mere $30-$50k: https://gothamartists.com/ezra-klein/

Yglesias sadly does not list his fee, you have to inquire: https://www.apbspeakers.com/speaker/matthew-yglesias/

his fee is one billion Americans

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:ecjlc5ouev63oweq5en4lsj3/bafkreihrcpzln2ydhjk5xnixpuqx32zznpe5u7hrqi2qklvl7urz4ubqrm@jpeg

A fantastic way to get billionaires to pay your negotiable speaking fees.

posting that shit at 3 am, buddy go to bed

I post shit at 3am! But that’s because I can’t sleep, not because I’m a brilliant political genius with special toilet ideas that come to me when I have an upset stomach in the early morning hours.

We would solve many problems if the important people went to bed at 10 p.m. no later

and never woke up

put matty in a lil cell from 8 pm to noon the next day, give him his 8 hours for posting, then back in the cell to think about what hes done

https://i.ibb.co/chP3LCq5/Screenshot-2025-12-29-at-7-01-19-PM.png

Also that post has like 6 comments, all from people insulting him. low-triple-digit number of likes. Does anyone actually care about him at all?

We do

Matty couldn’t sleep, wanted to jerk off to help but he can only get hard if people are yelling at him online.

Does anyone actually care about him at all?

Matty still has access to a MSM audience. He can still spread stupid, but minimally plausible, ideas that degrade the general discourse closer to his level. So, yes, a little.

you know you wrote a bad one when people are circling back on you in their year end pieces

But the most humiliating display of literate obliviousness in the face of the total collapse of meaning, however, was Ezra Klein’s bizarre eulogy to Charlie Kirk. The now-infamous column (“Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way”) can best be understood as an expression of class solidarity. Klein, I would argue, sees both himself and Kirk as being Debate Guys, wordcels who engage in the marketplace of ideas and let speech sort itself out into political action.

Ezra Klein is an artifact of the politics of literacy, a paradigm that is waning faster than my fingers can type these useless, useless words. But Charlie Kirk’s Debate Guy persona was a meme layered on top of sophisticated machinery. His Talking Points USA and Professor Watchlist were very much about action in the real world. In one deleted tweet, Kirk claimed that TPUSA had sent “80+ buses full of patriots” to DC for what would become the January 6th insurrection.
https://www.theverge.com/policy/849609/charlie-kirk-shooting-ideology-literacy-politics

on the most recent episode of "if books could kill," michael hobbes called it the worst take of the year.

gotta be in the running at least

it is terrible. there is a way of saying “that could be me and it scares the hell out of me” without completely misrepresenting kirk, his mission, and his method.

its funny because it couldnt be klein no one wants to kill centrist podcast guys he was freaking out for no reason, this is a thought leader

lol right who is mad at ezra, no one

the worst

https://i.postimg.cc/bwDQcBqd/mcardle.jpg

lol 'i'd like to hear some discussion'

i'd like to hear some discussion about how you encouraged children to rush shooters and thought the grenfell tower fire was an acceptable risk

megan mcfartcloud

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:4lwmxvcpognxkfe4vz5q5w6c/bafkreifdrlxlqpigqeqhynkkl55ae4a4hzs6xhoymbh7msyail6rxgjxku@jpeg

wonder if he thought it wasn't immoral or if he was just very forgiving. perhaps a dispute about the correct amount of respect to lose? we need some metrics on how much respect people think he should lose, maybe some public polling

the dry dick community is shown to skew heavily ezra

feel like knowing who this guy is at all diminishes my sexual prospects

lol true

Not getting laid because of Ezra is even more embarrassing than when young Republicans in Washington were whining about it.

At least being Ted Cruz’s personal foot stool is a job.