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

xp getting them to notice you, that is. you get what I mean

the guy is doing shitty things 24/7 then playing the victim when people dont like it, the fact that so many people cant identify this pattern is wild

Far too many people care about tone over content and he feeds off that

Activists in Minneapolis largely dismiss Stancil, including people I know personally. I take their word over his because he clearly has main character syndrome

otm

yeah I don't think he's a reliable narrator of his own actions because when he explains his own actions, it's very much "but I didn't break rules y and z" and everyone is saying "but you did x" and his response is to ignore that or explain why y and z are much more important than x. enough posts about y and z later, the people who did care about x have left the conversation and it's now about y and z

hes likening people who are posting spiderman gifs at him to a genuinely awful group of criminal abusers and demanding they be banned, now ask yourself whos the bully

yeah almost everyone involved is this spat is a "crybully," the whole deal here is to log on and verbally abuse and ridicule other folks while feeling (somehow) righteous about it. will stancil is a jerk but so are the people who are wasting their lives memorizing screenshots of his "greatest hits" and jumping into his replies to tell him he sucks ass.

how this guy has captured the imagine of leftist social media is actually somewhat unclear to me, but in 2026 the whole thing feels symbiotic (and stupid)

captured the imagination, I mean

Who's involved in it? I suspect that Stancil's enemies are random people on Twitter/Twitter Replacement with 34 followers, not a bunch of leftist media stars (such as they exist in the post-Bernie campaign landscape) or accounts with anything close to the reach he enjoys.

lmfao at the people defending this guy.

I think the overwhelming majority of people who actively attack and harass him are from the far right but he’s managed to make himself extremely unpopular with almost everyone (Democrats because he’s a vocal critic of their inaction, the left because he was an annoying bad-faith debate bro for years before switching his focus to his current targets). He’s not dissimilar to Oz Katerji in being often wrong, usually consistent and always irritating.

will stancil is a jerk but so are the people who are wasting their lives memorizing screenshots of his "greatest hits"

― intheblanks, Monday, May 4, 2026 12:55 AM (six hours ago)

check this one out tho

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:mdhqf6mc7rcq4ubsiv5fiun4/bafkreihokchkdazu2ftab2azfimbzv3cefagjpcswc56lke6dnqi2mckcm

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:mdhqf6mc7rcq4ubsiv5fiun4/bafkreih4bmkna6quo54n7hr5ytiyegenzb2pmcuptgtn5dqnmf6f7fs3um

Yglesias should adopt “abloo bloo bloo” so we can close the loop

Guys did you know posting mean memes online is exactly as bad as being a ceaselessly left punching dickhead with a platform far beyond his meagre talents (such as they are)?

its actually worse its literal torture

I'm having a second coffee because I read that as literal and not sarcastic for a moment. yikes

I don't think anyone involved in this looks good, really.

Ryan Cooper, in response to the recent goings-on, posted this excerpt from a blog post he wrote about Twitter in 2018 but which is still a useful description of the dynamics at work:

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:p5yoii26kayabauhkym3vtms/bafkreibontgypj5q4bysmuvn2a26ym2j542zbaf2t3mrieiyr2q3idj7xe

Well, yeah. That's why we're all gawking at the clusterfuck and no one here is responding to any of this on the social media sites in question, afaict

I don't think it'll surprise anyone here to know I've been considering moving and I now follow a half dozen very informative people from that area and the most they ever engage with the individual in question here is to say "please ignore him and stop responding to his posts", generally while they're writing very interesting things about city budget allocations and nice pictures of parks

cant believe youre moving just to yell posts at stencil in person

going to the twin cities to butt mog some zoomers

I don't think anyone involved in this looks good, really.

Ryan Cooper, in response to the recent goings-on, posted this excerpt from a blog post he wrote about Twitter in 2018 but which is still a useful description of the dynamics at work:

― jaymc, Monday, May 4, 2026 10:27 AM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this dynamic def exists but that excerpt is painted with a conveniently broad brush and def represents a form of insubstantial bothsidesism, having said that im sure its a bad experience to have people calling you a shithead in your comments all day and id prob just mute them in his shoes too, which of course doesnt mean that youre not a shithead, i feel like people replying with office memes and saying you won the internet could be just as bad tho, its funny that after all these years the internet still has solved the dont read the comments problem

it should be noted in this case and i feel like this is a pretty major thing to understand when pursuing stencil studies getting people mad at him online is his whole engagement strategy, he has never muted anyone because getting in fights with people and being insufferable is how he gains visibility, and to his credit he is very good at it

^^ xp this!

I really don't get why the hell people do the "this!" thing instead of reposting or hitting like or whatever. that's the particular one that drives me insane. also the office reaction gifs.

Another possible approach to making social media better (for oneself and others) might be to develop interests beyond US electoral politics, and talk about those instead.

remember when there was the app called this

https://i0.wp.com/media2.giphy.com/media/yoJC2i270b1mQvcDdK/giphy.gif

I don’t understand why these people waste time on this

Like why does anyone care what these people have to say in the first place?

meant to say i cant believe you didnt know who matt yglasias is that seems impossible

xpost He's a Bluesky obsession I guess. Kind of like ilx has with Bob Lefsetz.

studying weird guys online is a legitimate recognized hobby

the number of netroots nation-brained people in the general populace should be studied

Lefsetz is another person whom I know only as an ilx thread title

yeah its wild one interesting thing about them is they dont really realize theyre dead enders theyre aware there are more people attacking dems from the left and have made them their sworn enemies but they dont know that theyre not the mainstream anymore just foot soldiers for a rump dem establishment xp

i have observed this in real life people too its not just online maniacs, some genx mac users are just sailing along with clinton era politics more or less intact, not nearly all of them but some

oh yeah, I have one friend who is a nice guy but is very Yglesias-brained. what's funny is that we have a shared friend named Matt who looks like Matt Y in some pictures

Yglesias just churns out so many goofy opinions that I think people seize on a handful and ignore most of his meandering, self-contradictory output

I have no idea if a coworker who has some inscrutable to me political ideas is a Klein/Yglesias guys but that fellow has really conservative parents and he's expressed that he likes Joe Lieberman-style politicians and I have to not inquire further

ha yeah stuff like that is amazing joe lieberman were not talking about joe lieberman anymore those days are gone

There was a decade or two of internet writing/podcasting (Slate, Freakonomics, 538 etc.) that posited that smart = contrarianism and dumb = partisanship, so I think quite a few professional class people still subscribe to that ethos.

yeah one of the things that people find appealing about the technocracy is that you can just have an ad hoc collection of opinions and no values, your politics are sociopathic and incoherent but you feel smart about it

there were a lot of TED talks that fall into that classification, too. a lot of gee whiz big idea stuff that had absolutely nothing behind the facade

Full stack of stupid

Yeah, If Books Could Kill has done a good job at demolishing a lot of that stuff, like Cass Sunstein's Nudge.

obama admin loved nudge and were doing insane things like not publicly taking credit for their accomplishments based on its teachings my god

behavioral economics still has some sway in certain corners, which is p wild given its replication problems

See noted political strategist and moron doms cumming who drove the uks covid response

not going to google to see if that's an actual name

All too actual

smartest guy in the room: what if we based our governing strategy on an airport book

jaymc, you listened to that new-ish episode on Grit? same deal, just ridiculous fluff