matt has an entire paragraph, with a footnote, talking about basis points and apparently at no point looked up what a basis point is because he's off by a factor of 100. https://t.co/A2ACWCMIvQ
— your himbo boyfriend (@swolecialism) January 11, 2023
Detail-heavy, unintentionally revealing beat sweetener from Dan Zak, at the Washington Post:
Matt Yglesias can talk about supervolcanoes and about Habsburg federalism and about the semiconductor industry in Taiwan vs. China. He can talk about regulatory sensitivities around geothermal drilling. He can talk normative ethics and the Ghent system and occupational licensing and maritime commerce in Westeros, the fictional realm of “Game of Thrones.” He can talk about all these things and, perhaps more importantly, he can sound like he knows what he’s talking about…
When enthusiastic or challenged in conversation, Yglesias’s speaking voice can reach a cartoonish tenor reminiscent of Jiminy Glick. His writing voice, however, remains flat. He is a “logic machine” at the keyboard, according to friends. He is a parody of artificial intelligence, according to haters.
“It’s the best time there’s ever been to be somebody who can write something coherent quickly,” Yglesias says, over coffee. “I find it relaxing to work. I put things out. People yell at me. I will write again the next day.”
Yglesias, 41, has been writing online nonstop since he was 20. In the aughts, he was an insurgent, liberal blogger who helped turn prolific posting into an industry standard. In the 2010s, he co-founded Vox to institutionalize this ethos and to bigfoot old-guard media. Now he’s struck gold on the newsletter platform Substack, where at least 13,000 people each pay Matt Yglesias an average of $80 a year for access to his Yglesiasms, and to a robust comment section about moral relativism and windowless bedrooms and child tax credits and storm-water runoff. On Twitter, Yglesias has more than half a million followers, and a habit of exasperating people with his contrarian stabs at wit. But his Substack is a place where a fractious world is rendered logical, where self-proclaimed moderates and rationalists find refuge from so-called purists and radicals…
Among the political newsletters on Substack’s leader board, which is stocked with Gen-X reactionaries to what Yglesias has called the “Great Awokening,” he is No. 8 in readership, between the conniptions of Glenn Greenwald and the braying of Andrew Sullivan. Yglesias’s is one of a few Substacks that earn north of $1 million per year in subscription revenue. Yglesias named his Substack “Slow Boring,” after a 1919 lecture by the German sociologist Max Weber titled “Politics as a Vocation,” wherein “boring” is not an adjective of dullness but a gerund of diligence…
Celebrated public intellectual attempts math, falls down open manhole: https://t.co/k7KJtwFGxy
— Defector (@DefectorMedia) January 11, 2023
Much more entertaining explainer / rebuttal from Chris Thompson, at Defector:
If there is a professional blogger out there who hasn’t made a regrettable, excruciating error in one of their blogs, please tell that person that I hate them. Certainly I have had to correct many published errors… Volume blogging, and especially volume blogging without a careful, professional editor, is like sprinting along a balance beam while tired and distracted and out-of-shape. You are going to slip, and sooner or later one of those slips will have extremely embarrassing consequences. And that’s not even getting into the times when you get an innocent stranger killed by your unwise mocking of lightning.
Matt Yglesias performs as a big-brained public intellectual, but what he really is is a volume blogger, and a social media provocateur. Yglesias’s gimmick is the appearance of rigor and rationality, which he accomplishes mostly by affecting a tone of patronizing superiority. But his real talent is for triangulating positions that will be maximally annoying to what he has identified as a liberal consensus, and then doing just enough Wikipedia-surfing of the issues at hand to launch half-assed arguments and inflame online discourse. These salvos are very popular among people who identify as politically moderate, because the smoke-and-mirrors esotericism guarantees that the ensuing discourse will only grind any productive conversation to a miserable halt. In a very good Washington Post profile of Yglesias, published, rather hilariously, Wednesday morning, his whole fuckin’ deal is summed up very beautifully:
The affect is one of solution, of authority, of “aha!”
The effect is vaporous, curious, “huh?” – Dan Zak, Washington Post
… Relative to the rest of the blogging world, Yglesias is making bank, but for that bank he has to do all the blogging himself. It’s a big undertaking—his only editor, Zak reports, is Kate Crawford, who is his wife—and one that necessarily requires that Yglesias ride the razor’s edge every day, of churning out content without necessarily always having time to make sure the content is, ah, factually accurate.
Take, by way of an extremely convenient example, the blog that Yglesias published to his newsletter early Wednesday morning. Titled “A new plan to get around the debt ceiling hostage,” the blog confronts the somewhat made-up problem that some number of people might be uncomfortable with the so-called Platinum Coin solution to our government’s escalating debt, which is itself a made-up problem…
The largest problem with Yglesias’s proposal—the thing that makes it fail right on its face—is true math nerd shit. Please hang in here for this part. Treasuries have fixed terms—they are not perpetuities, which generate payments without end—and so there is a relatively fixed maximum value of each one. As explained by God-tier business blogger Matt Levine, the yield to maturity of a U.S. Treasury is not some humongous number that will one day make you rich, and therefore the number you would expect any non-insane person to pay for it at auction is not, like, some eye-popping landscape-altering sum. Yglesias wants the rational market price for one of these hypothetical one-month bonds to be $712 for $100 of debt, but according to Levine it is actually something more like $102 to $105. So this would probably not be a solution to the so-called debt ceiling crisis, unless the government is planning on issuing literally trillions of dollars of treasuries using this dipshit model…
But there’s another problem with Yglesias’s dipshit blog, and it is the funnier one, by far. At a couple points in the blog Yglesias refers to “basis points,” most notably in the section where he sort of haughtily endeavors (and fails) to translate into layman’s terms the concept of bond yield.
[Yglesias claims, incorrectly, that “a basis point is just a percentage point.”]…
A “basis point” extremely is not a percentage point. In fact a “basis point” is 1/100th of a percentage point. Finance guys like to say “basis point” instead of “percentage point” not only because they are different things, but because math and finance conversations can get very confusing very quickly without a way to differentiate between percentages and, for example, percentages of percentages. As explained to Defector by a highly placed source close to Defector’s business operations, “If you told me ‘this mortgage will have an interest rate of 10 percent,’ and I said, ‘what if it were two percent higher,’ you would be confused if I meant ‘what if it were 12 percent’ or ‘what if it were 10.2 percent.’” This source went on to point out that if you type the words “why do we use bps instead of percentages” into Google, you do not even need to click on any of the many many many available links to get a perfectly succinct and clear explanation…
a guy who has made a twenty year career of "sounding like he knows what he's talking about" and who has yet never learned a single fact even by accident
— your himbo boyfriend (@swolecialism) January 11, 2023
As with Obama and David Brooks, I'm not sure which is more depressing: that they read and are influenced by Ygleslias or that they think there is a minor political upside in claiming they are https://t.co/5Xttfb0sob
— your himbo boyfriend (@swolecialism) January 11, 2023
My proposition: Matt Yglesias is widely read & financially successful because he confirms the prior biases of many well-to-do, extremely online readers skimmers. (#NotAllYglesiasReaders, of course.) There’s always a market for superficially plausible reasons why All is for the best, in this best of all possible worlds!
And lo! An immediate, easy-reading confirmation:
I suspect the post-2016 freakout about social media “misinformation” was driven by displaced guilt over the way the country’s legacy media but-her-emails’d us into darkness. https://t.co/T748mC5ET5
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) January 12, 2023
‘Attractive’ headline, seriously misguided argument in the post itself:
… In terms of the discourse, I don’t think anyone credible is still seriously arguing that the pro-Trump Russian meme accounts were a decisive factor in the election, though the relevance of those accounts is sometimes downplayed by those on the right who want to blind themselves to the Russian government’s role in the election. But I think this is a good opportunity to step back and look at the explosion of interest in “misinformation” in the wake of the 2016 election specifically because I think an enormous share of this interest is a kind of displaced guilt.
After all, it wasn’t the GRU that made The New York Times run this front page on the weekend before Election Day…
The irony is that the mainstream media’s relationship with Donald Trump was obviously and objectively very hostile. The New York Times in particular was quite tough in their coverage of him, and Trump would frequently vent with extreme rhetoric against the paper. After the election, the Times published a lot of great journalism about the Trump White House and also benefitted financially from a liberal subscriber base that saw the Times as a bastion of freedom and enlightenment in a dark time. The Washington Post tilted even further in this direction with its “Democracy Dies in Darkness” tagline. And while the Post is now in business trouble, the very well-managed NYT played the whole thing perfectly, reaping a huge Trump Bump but also using his four years in office to strengthen the larger business and build an appealing bundle with all kinds of great cooking and games content.
But the fact remains that if you want to place blame for Trump’s narrow victory over Clinton on someone or something in the information environment, it’s not the Russians or Facebook or “misinformation” you should be looking to — it’s the most influential mainstream news outlets in America…
Baud
???
lowtechcyclist
Pull the other one, Matt.
p.a.
I read MattyY and Sullivan (in his “view-from-the-window” era) at one time. I got better👍🏻
Tried to read GG back then too, but my attention span has normal humanish limits.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
The best part is the next line
tobie
Far be it from me to defend Yglesias. I find contrarians exhausting, and Matt’s respect for Megan McArdle troubling. That said, his comments about legacy media and the 2016 campaign seem to be based on this very recent article in Nature:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35576-9
ian
I lost all respect for Matt Y. when he argued that Democratic officials would be better off “ducking” the fight for transgendered rights.
Baud
@tobie:
I don’t think he’s wrong that major media was more harmful than the Russians. Especially the NYT.
2liberal
after they got him elected.
Brachiator
Hmm. Recently it has been revealed that AI is being used to write some news stories.
I wonder if AI generated pundit pieces might be better than the drivel put out by people like Yglesias.
zhena gogolia
@2liberal: Cf. George Santos.
Michael Bersin
Meanwhile, in the right wingnut republican controlled Missouri House of Representatives:
The right to bare arms shall be infringed
Because, reasons…
West of the Rockies
So tired of these self-assured, self-indulgent hipster dudes who live to enlighten and impress us dweebs.
Sure Lurkalot
Thanks, Matt, I think we get how megalomaniac liars are good for the media’s (and your) bottom line. However, your so-called profession actually does require more (much more) of you and your peers. Unfortunately, no matter how much we kick and scream for you to do better, it might be time to face the fact that you simply can’t.
Anne Laurie
You’ve seen today’s Doonesbury, then?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Baud: digital subscriptions down because they didn’t get wordle and don’t have a cooking section that draws views? Also, the NYT is the hometown paper for the kind of people, all over the country, who play wordle and want to try out a fresh twist on Brussel sprouts in a way The Washington Post has never been, a demo that has a very romantic view of living in NY
ETA: tote-baggers, as we used to say
Matt McIrvin
I used to read some of the blogs he jumped between back in the day–the most irritating thing about them was that he absolutely refused to moderate the comments at all, and for a while, professional white supremacist Steve Sailer basically ruled them as his personal fiefdom, making every thread about his animus toward Black people sooner or later. I always assumed Yglesias just wasn’t paying attention, but apparently he’d sometimes bring up Sailer as this quirky contrarian figure who he didn’t agree with 100% but who would sometimes drop the occasional nuugget of wisdom. (There were no nuggets of wisdom, just uncut racism, and rants about how liberals were in thrall to their political correctness despite all the solid scientific support for white supremacy.)
Brachiator
@Anne Laurie:
Ha! Right on the money.
kindness
I read Ygleslias early stuff and really liked it. But then he became a moderate version of David Brooks. I still will read his stuff when it pops up in the intertubes but won’t subscribe to him. He’s become his own version of the Village Elders that are so high on their own supply they don’t see they’ve become caricatures of themselves.
Baud
We really need to increase marginal tax rates.
narya
@Baud: I’ve been subscribing for a bit, but am not going to renew. My main reason is that the front page has WAY too much space on it. For all of its other problems, the FYNYT has a digital layout that makes it easy to find what I want to read and skip the rest.
Omnes Omnibus
@kindness:
I think that reading MattY has become a habit that people haven’t bothered to break. People liked him back when blogs were new and they got in the habit of reading him. He is now an anodyne contrarian who never really offends or even makes people think. No one new is going to start reading him, but no one is going to get so annoyed by him that they stop. He is beige.
trollhattan
“How wet is it?”
California rain continues for at least another day until we have a predicted break, Tuesday. This is great for the drought, not so great for folks whose homes are standing in newly formed lakes. Still eyeballing the rivers and levees nervously.
Our biggest reservoir is the Sierra snowpack–how’s that doing? Pretty, pretty good. Using the three-region model, north, central, south, the water content is 97, 119 and 138% of the April 1 historical average–the day it is traditionally at its maximum. The percentage for the date is more impressive: 206, 246. 285%. All of these values exceed what the did on this date, the year of the greatest snowpack ever measured.
https://cdec.water.ca.gov/reportapp/javareports?name=PLOT_SWC.pdf
Last season we were excited about the wet December, then the driest Jan-March in history occurred. This year looks quite different, but there are still reservoirs to fill and groundwater to replenish. One does not reverse a decade-long drought in one year.
Jinchi
Matt was always exasperating mathematically, not so much because he was bad at it, but because he didn’t realize how bad he was at it, even when it was central to his arguments.
I remember a particularly cringeworthy post when he discovered that you can measure fuel consumption in gallons-per-mile as easily as miles-per-gallon, and suddenly he had the solution to our climate problem.
MattF
Don’t know why, exactly, but I lose track of MattY’s arguments a dozen or so words into them. I just lose focus… or something. I’ve pretty much quit reading him, since there’s nothing to learn or take away.
Jess
@Brachiator: Hahaha! Poor Rick.
geg6
I quit that idiot Yglesias way back when he was arguing vociferously that there is absolutely no good reason to license barbers, hairdressers and nail techs. Stupidest shit I ever read. He knows absolutely nothing about what these people do, how they do it and the issues that can arise if they are not properly trained and licensed. Fucking lazy dimwit.
raven
Yesterday there was a big celebration of the University of Georgia’s second consecutive national championship. Last night a player and support staff person were killed in a car wreck. Hold people tightly.
Mai Naem mobile
I was aware of him but never followed Yglesias on the blogs. I don’t even remember where he blogged…TNR? Anyhow, whenever I see his @mattyglesias I always think ‘Matty Glesias’ and what adult guy goes by the name ‘Matty’?
Mike in NC
Glad to have not read anything by Andrew Sullivan in the last ten years.
chrome agnomen
@trollhattan: but can we stop raking the forests yet?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Mike in NC: it was interesting to me how he kind of vanished when he left… was it The Atlantic where he had his last platform? In this age of the viral and the re-tweet Sullivan, Dowd, Friedman, Brooks… one could easily forget they’re out there.
dm
I liked Yglesias when he was on Vox podcasts. There he was in a mix, and his contributions really did strike me as insightful in a cut-to-the-root-of-the-matter sort of way. I’ve never been too keen on his writing, though.
The big excerpt Anne quotes on the media impact on the 2016 election seems okay to me, other than the “media were tough on Trump” — I think the media didn’t take Trump seriously enough to be tough on him, prior to the actual election.
But then, I’ve always viewed the Cletus safaris as attempts to understand an alien culture and explain it to their subscribers, not as attempts at normalization. The NYT is never very god’s when they attempt anthropology.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Yeah, I always said it was a “noble savage” approach to people they don’t understand and wanted to sympathize with, because as Charlie Pierce reminds us, it wasn’t about race, because nothing is ever about race. Also because it was their cousins and their friends’ parents and their old college roommates and… Stephanie Ruehle had an MSNBC morning show in the early trump term, and I’d bet she said the words, “Not all trump voters are racist. My mom voted for trump and she’s no racist!” Then she interviewed her mom (for the love of god, why do they allow this kind of shit) at the height of the child separation scandal and her mom trotted out the old “I wish he would tweet less….” line. She was fine with him putting small children in cages, she just wished he wasn’t so very vulgar about it.
different-church-lady
Yet when Norm walks in the bar, his is the name everyone calls out.
EthylEster
I stopped reading MY years (soon, decades) ago when he had a typo in the first paragraph of six consecutive things I read by him. I got the impression he was committed to quantity over quality. So I am enjoying this post.
Bill Arnold
@tobie:
That Nature paper is annoyingly smug, but I have not carefully read it yet so won’t comment further. (E.g. it appears to not discuss that some of the messaging was intended to stir up strife, e.g. targeting small ethnic sub communities with divisive narratives, but maybe there’s a mention.)
The 2016 Russian influence operations also included the DNC/Podesta email thefts/dribbling timed releases. (Russia was definitely involved, though not solely so.)
And the 2016 election was decided by about 80K votes in battleground states, which means that small effects mattered.
(Same (smaller margin, even) for the 2020 election; the Democrats and their allies were better in that cycle though.)
different-church-lady
Geminid
I find that generally opinion pieces, whether on news sites or blogs like Yglesias’s, are a waste of time to read. There is always a need to prove a point even of that means leaving out information or exaggerating it.
I’ll pay attention to someone like Magdi Jacobs (Mangy Jay) because she is very honest, and has an outsider’s point of view. Jacobs also has a good bases of social science knowledge that informs and adds value to her analysis. But people like her are relatively scarce, while the Yglesiases are a dime a dozen.
So I try to spend the time I save not reading op-ed pieces and opinion blogs by reading news, news and more news.
trollhattan
@chrome agnomen: Excellent question! I’ll consult the next Finn I encounter–they’re the experts, per TFG.
different-church-lady
@dm:
It, exactly. And the ironic thing is, in their attempts to take these inscrutable creatures seriously, they are, in a perverse way, being more condescending than if they had just called them yokels out loud.
kent
Wow we’re doubling down on the hate on MattY!!
You guys seem to want to make me choose between him and you. But I like you both!
Elizabelle
@kent: Choose Matt. Please. For all our sakes.
Hoodie
@Brachiator: From the few examples I’ve seen, ChatGPT churns out stuff that’s much like Yglesias’ stuff, i.e., sounds brainy but often factually way off.
different-church-lady
@kent: It does not matter to me whether I am chosen.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@trollhattan: stop raking the forests?? Good heavens, no, there are pine needles all over the floor. What do you think will happen when the rain stops? We need volunteers, hurry!
different-church-lady
@Baud: If I had $80 to waste, it’d be going to the local charity pet care org.
[In fact, now that my finances have recovered a bit, $100 will be doing just that.]
different-church-lady
@Brachiator:
Look, the AI was just allowing them to do what they already did before (scrape and regurgitate), but faster and with hardly any effort.
different-church-lady
Birds of a feather.
Baud
@kent:
We’re cheaper.
schrodingers_cat
@different-church-lady: Nepo babies born with a silver spoon in their mouths. Who got media sinecures without having any expertise or talent.
different-church-lady
So speaking of AI-type things: there’s this little “win probability” ticker gadget on ESPN.com. Buffalo runs two plays (Inc, then 17 yard pass) and their win probability is already 96.3%. TWO freakin’ plays, no points on the board, not even a minute off the clock, and “science” already says the game is over.
I mean, I agree that Miami doesn’t have much of a chance, but this is just using statistics to be stupid while appearing smart.
James E Powell
@dm:
But the impact of the coverage is that it normalizes, and to a certain extent, romanticizes the ignorance & bigotry. Check the photos that go with the articles. They all think they are doing Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
And I guess it’s just a coincidence that those people vote for the party that keeps taxes & wages low.
Matt McIrvin
@Hoodie: On math Mastodon, when ChatGPT became available there was a flurry of mathematicians asking it for proofs and such. It wrote like a bluffing poor student who knew a bunch of terms and maybe some definitions, but hadn’t done any of the homework and had no concept of a correct proof. But with absolute, brazen confidence.
different-church-lady
@schrodingers_cat:
I have to believe it has far more to do with their ability to make personal connections than the meritocracy of their work.
And such is true in nearly all professions really — who you connect with means more than how good you are at what you do.
James E Powell
I always found Yglesias was hard to take. Not that I disliked him, I just never paid much attention. Long before there were blogs, I was already tired of upper class dorks explaining the world. Où sont les Roykos d’antan?
Matt McIrvin
@different-church-lady: For some reason they’re really fond of the idea that they’re the clueless elites living in a liberal bubble and that they need to get out and get in touch with the common folk… who are these bigoted old trolls in diners. I think they take it as a backhanded affirmation of their status as high-class yet broad-minded intellectuals.
Starfish.
@tobie: In early blogging, McArdle, Yglesias, and Ezra Klein were a tight little group. Ezra Klein seemed most serious and knowledgeable of them all.
wonkie
I used to read Matt way back in the Bush admin when I was new to blogging and a lot of bloggers were new too. I don’t remember him back then as being a smug contrarian who is contrary as a means of faking intelligence. Is this pseudo-intellectual repudiation of progressives the result of being a member of the mainstream that he used to criticize? Or is it how he became part of the elite? At any rate, I rarely read blogs anymore. I read Balloon Juice and Obsidian Wings. That’s it.
Soprano2
@Geminid: Did you see that she thinks the press is trying to turn the Biden classified documents into another ButHerEmails “scandal”? I think their motives are simpler – advertisers really don’t like it when only one side is being criticized, so the news networks see this as a way to placate advertisers. I got that from someone on Twitter who claimed to have worked at one of these news networks. It strikes me as plausible.
Starfish.
@Matt McIrvin: Tyler Cowen’s comments are also full of white supremacists. It is so irritating. I would read everyone’s contrarian bullshit a little more if they weren’t caping for white supremacy.
Matt McIrvin
@Starfish.: It really serves as laundering and platforming for straight-up Nazi shit, even if the front-pagers won’t outright endorse it.
There was a short period when Sailer was posting articles at TalkingPointsMemo!
Starfish.
@Omnes Omnibus: He constantly manages to offend the people who are not lazy white men by not bothering to think of them as people.
Omnes Omnibus
@Starfish.: Sure, but they aren’t the ones subscribed to his substack,
Starfish.
@geg6: Well, the people who read Yglesias to learn about barbers, hairdressers, and nail techs really don’t speak to their barbers, hairdressers or nail techs, and they are happy to accept whatever Yglesias makes up about them, especially if it agrees with their Libertarian world view.
Mike in Pasadena
@Elizabelle: This reply is a good example of something that exemplified twitter in its first years.
Geminid
@Soprano2: Yeah, I was listening to a rebroadcast of Meet the Press on the radio today and Mr. Todd was puffing that story up and saying how bad it is for Biden.
I thought to myself, “You know, Joe Biden’s gonna win or lose next year based on the economy, and this bullshit is just so much background noise.”
scott (the other one)
13,000 people x $80 = $1,040,000.
$1,040,000 a year. For MattY’s writings. $1,040,000.
The FSM wept.
tobie
@Bill Arnold: I agree. The article defines influence in a very narrow way and doesn’t investigate how much Facebook and Twitter rumors and memes dictated the conversation in the national press and on cable.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
Damn straight!
Starfish
@kent: What do you find compelling about him?
I remember you said you liked him and some other person that I find pretty stupid too in the other thread.
I think part of this is because everyone has a low bar for male public intellectuals.
There are ladies who are much smarter who don’t have as much of an audience as these men do, and I resent that.
lowtechcyclist
@Jess:
Shouldn’t Redfern be, like, seventy years old, even in comic strip time? He was covering Ginny Slade’s campaign about the same time Kim Rosenthal was the last baby out of Saigon (“Big Mac! Big Mac!”).
Geminid
@Starfish: People like Yglesias have learned to put the “Pay” in Patriarchy.
Yglesias could never, ever win a debate in writing with Magdi Jacobs, though. She’d run rings around him.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Soprano2: I think this is the key point she makes:
People right, left and center were looking to reasons to justify varying degrees of hostility toward HRC, so Republicans were able to hang “emails” and “Benghazi” on her. They spent more than a year trying to hang the latter on Obama and it didn’t take outside of the fever swamps. Outside of those swamps, people who aren’t necessarily Biden fans, who would bail on him, or stick with him, over the price gas or their last peek at their 401K, don’t hate/resent/mistrust him like a lot of them did HRC
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Geminid: from Vox to Subtack, freedom from editorial/space constraints have not, IMHO, been good for Yglesias as a writer.
Geminid
Ron Klain may read Matt Yglesias, but that doesn’t mean Klain’s reading him for instruction. Klain knows too much not to see through Yglesias.
Klain might be reading Yglesias to see how a certain group is thinking, kind of like the way I listen to Hew Hewitt.
schrodingers_cat
@Starfish.: That is not just MattY’s MO you have described 90% of media punditry here.
James E Powell
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Agree, but have to add that Republicans hanging emails & Benghazi on Clinton would not have been possible without the enthusiastic cooperation of the political media.
oldster
@kent:
Matt-hating is a local BJ foible that I gladly overlook because I like 90% of the other content here, and I like the commenting community.
Matt himself has some foibles that I likewise overlook because I like 90% of the other content and I like the commenting community.
I don’t feel the need to pretend the people I hang out with are infallible. If they say interesting things on a regular basis, then I can screen out the occasional dud kernel from the bowl of popcorn.
lowtechcyclist
@Matt McIrvin:
Funny how it was always Midwestern white folk, and never even Midwestern black folk in a Cleveland barber shop.
And of course they’d never Google the people they interviewed in that or other contexts, so they’d present Republican operatives as just ordinary Joes and Janes they happened to run into, sharing their ordinary American views.
Starfish
@schrodingers_cat: True. You made a lot of great points in this thread.
lowtechcyclist
@Geminid:
Reminds me of the last government shutdown, which was (IIRC) right after the 2018 midterms, and people were talking about how that was going to affect 2020. And of course by the beginning of 2020 (let alone later in 2020, when the pandemic blasted everything else off the map) practically nobody was thinking about it.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@James E Powell: I count the political media– again, Left, Right and Center– and more than a few politicians, among those who hated/resented/mistrusted HRC for reasons a lot of them probably couldn’t articulate.
Subsole
@2liberal:
Just like their famously stringent and unblinking Iraq coverage.
In 2006.
delphinium
@James E Powell: Yup, especially since it was the House republicans who voted to cut embassy security funding that hampered Benghazi security, which (if I recall correctly), was hardly mentioned by the media.
Subsole
@Michael Bersin:
One Republican gets caught by his spouse viewing an arm fetish site, and we all lose the right to short sleeves.
Soprano2
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I agree that it’ll be a lot harder to make it stick to Biden, who’s like everyone’s grandpa, and is white.
Another Scott
@scott (the other one):
Of course, Substack gets its cut:
Stripe CC fees are 2.9% + $0.30 + 1% if foreign transaction.
I assume there are some other fees buried in there somewhere. Everyone wants their cut…
Cheers,
Scott.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Subsole:
Is that a thing? I had no idea. I’m so naive.
different-church-lady
@scott (the other one): Hey, there are expenses. Like… uh… internet service. So, he’s only taking home like a measly $1,039,000.
different-church-lady
@Mr. Bemused Senior: Rule 34.
Geminid
@lowtechcyclist: I keep saying this and I’ll say it again: a reporter would do better to interview people in Starbucks shops.
The suburbs of prospering cities are the key battlegrounds now in purple states and districts, and that is the case across the country from Decatur, Georgia to Shawnee, Kansas to Scottsdale, Arizona. These people are more electorally significant than the ones in the rustbelt diners reporters like to visit. Those matter as people for sure, but I think that politically they are more or less irrelevant.
MisterDancer
NOTE: I confess I write the below from the POV of someone who, in theory, writes here from time to time.
The issue is that it turns out writing on demand is hard. And yeah, I think that, over the years and with the reduction in editorial engagement, and esp. since he’s got to keep output up and regular to make money, he takes shortcuts, and says things that are not well considered, regularly.
And when that aligns with not doing the work on your facts, that’s where my issues with Matty-boy begin. Add to that his too-casual use of the f-word and shitty alignment to TERF-y ideas as documented here and here? Yeah, I see no need to advocate for reading him “sometimes” to glean “nuggets,” when many of his good ideas can be found elsewhere from people who don’t rub themselves in “Cancel Culture is Bad!” advocacy on the side.
I don’t hate Yglesias. He’s not a Sully or a Greenwald. But he runs in those circles too much for my liking, and as much as I can somewhat sympathize with the need to get the work out — there’s a reason I don’t FP much here, when I consider the time needed to engage the comment section for one! — I cannot condone wiping out any sense of Social Justice and Promoting Equality to focus on his brand of “Liberalism”.
He’s not that great a thinker to get a “bye” on these points. Much less to pay $80/year to read same.
Subsole
@dm:
Really? After about the fifteenth time, I started reading it as a lowkey gaslight. Like, soft bullying/peer pressure.
“Hey, now, c’mon, you silly liberals. These people are just people like us. Look at their charming rustic suburban folkways. Don’t they seem authentic? Aren’t you being a little unreasonable and shrill, not trying to meet them halfway?”
Just endless.
“Oh, these poor, noble rustic savages. Did they really have any choice but to vote for the man who stroked their vacuous, imaginary grievances? How could you shrill, judgmental harpies possibly take this all so personally, and call them hateful bigots? These trumpers are real people, with real people opinions, and don’t you owe them all of the courtesy and respect that they have never even pretended to be interested in showing you??”
Then a week later, half the time, it comes out that the random locals interviewed were actually local GOP midwigs or affiliated activists. And like 35 to 40% of ‘Trump Town’ actually voted for the Democrat – but never got interviewed.
It really, really felt like the media was trying to bully me into thinking these spiteful assholes were simultaneously:
A. Not spiteful assholes
B. Totally justified in their spite, which was both cool and good, actually, and which I totally deserved for inflaming their delicate little insecurities
C. A lot more representative of the general public than they actually were, are, or likely ever will be (barring some kind of catastrophic malfunction in the basic laws of human brain-chemistry)
TL;DR: After a few weeks, it felt like GOP soft-spin. A way to normalize and inflate the Trumpist position while somehow also exonerating it.
Subsole
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Of course Jim said it better…
<shakes fist>
Subsole
@Baud:
In many, many ways!
different-church-lady
@Subsole:
You are very much not alone in feeling this way. As I said right after this election: the media was either complicit, or willingly duped. But there’s utterly no possibility they were just innocently wrong.
MagdaInBlack
@Subsole: All of the above, but mostly C.
And of course, normalization.
Subsole
@Soprano2:
Advertisers probably aren’t gonna like President for Life Ron DeSantis’ broadcast/publication regulatory policies, either.
At least, not if they want to sell to blacks, gays, Muslims, or people who think women have a right to learn how to read.
Or in any way expand their markets beyond the ‘cishet white men of sufficient property and station who also happen to vote for the correct conservative orthodoxy’ demographic.
delphinium
@Geminid:
Or go to a laundromat. Depending on location, you could get a decent cross section of various demographics-young adult thru elderly and working class, middle class, retired folks.
Miss Bianca
@Geminid: You’re presuming that what they’re interested in is what’s actually happening with voter views, as opposed to serving a narrative set by their publishers.
Subsole
@lowtechcyclist:
First off, this. How on Earth do you go to Cleveland Ohio and not meet any black folks?
Second, you have far more faith in these people than I do. I think they know, full well, who they sit down to interview. Their omissions are deliberate.
sab
@ian: I lost all respect for Matt Y early in his career when he was writing about health care policy and yet did not know that emergency room visits are not free. He has never troubled his beautiful mind with looking for actual facts.
Miss Bianca
@Subsole: Eh, I think you did a pretty fine job of summing it up, yourself.
Subsole
@Mr. Bemused Senior: I have no idea. That just seems to be how it usually goes. Conservative is attracted to some group, tries to outlaw them because his urges are totally their fault, gets busted with seven of them in a cocaine-saturated praise-gospel disco-hall two months later.
Soprano2
@Geminid: I agree with you. I think the Cletus Safarirs were always about those people being white and working class; the press sees them as the “average, regular” voter even though that’s less and less true. Most of the population still thinks white working class men and women are the average voter; as long as that’s true, I think the press will continue to cover them that way. We all noticed that there was little to no effort to interview Biden voters, because even though there are more of us we aren’t seen as the average voter!
Subsole
@different-church-lady:
Right? I remember Wolf Blitzer whimpering about ‘getting played again’ after some Trump stunt, back in 2016, I think, and thinking: “my dude, if you keep lining up to get played by the people who keep playing you, you ain’t getting played.”
2liberal
he has always been a notoriously bad speller also.
Starfish
@MisterDancer: Everything you have ever written as a front pager has been extremely thoughtful. I can see that it has weighed more heavily on you than your time here as a commenter. I want you to know that you have done a great job.
When it comes to “write every day” versus “write less frequent but more thoughtful stuff,” I prefer the latter, even though the algorithms everywhere are set up with a large bias for recency and forget you exist if you have not written something every day.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Yglesias is a neoliberal, yimby doooshbag. His yimby crap alone makes him reprehensible.
He always makes it seem like he is part of some sort of correct, reasonable majority on any given issue, when in fact he is a useless turd whose input has never been salient in any context whatsoever.
The fact that he’s never been put onto an ice floe in the dead of winter and pushed far out to see is proof that there is no just and benevolent divine being.
Subsole
@MagdaInBlack:
In a nutshell. I mean, I could almost blow it off as “trying to understand the public” if they had ever, ever done a similar torrent of ‘how can conservatives win over these vulnerable communities that they traditionally harm and disrespect?’
Nope.
It’s always just the same tired slop: “how can every other community on earth crop, diminish, degrade, and mutilate itself to avoid making this one section of the public not feel it has been inconvenienced in any manner?”
And it only ever runs one way.
Subsole
@Miss Bianca: Thanks.
Starfish
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: What do you mean by the word YIMBY in the way you are using it?
“Yes In My Backyard” (YIMBY) was a plea to have more housing density when housing costs were spiraling out of control. Also, people see density as something that adds walkability and bikeability and reduces car dependence.
Sometimes, YIMBY stuff does not consider issues like gentrification when it should, but the desire for affordable housing and a walkable neighborhood is not terrible.
Starfish
@Subsole: Yes, the whole attempt overlooks that the states where cletuses live are anti-democratic and always working to disenfranchise the various not cletuses.
Barbara
You know what this tells me? That Matt Yglesias has never had a mortgage. He has never had to borrow money to finance a house. Because I don’t work in finance, and I learned what a basis point was when I took out my mortgage. Certain fees are often denominated in basis points, and the mortgage broker helpfully explained what that meant to me.
delphinium
@Starfish: This.
Aussie Sheila
Late to the thread, because I slept in.
May I say how much I enjoyed it.
Every diss on Matty and in particular the observations on the ftfnyt Cletus safaris were delicious. Almost as good as my oats and raspberries breakfast.
Oh, just to say, matty is useless, because unless you like having your dumb centrist, chin stroking ego stroked, he doesn’t know enough about any subject to be instructive and his income prevents him from understanding just how little he actually knows about most things.
Except how to make a bundle appealing to people who think David Brooks is an intellectual.
Lit3Bolt
If a significant plurality of the internet can predict the tenor, scope, and content of your arguments before you even write them, then maybe, just maybe, it’s time to stop writing so much.
“But ackshually, the status quo is good!” Whoa, easy there with such a spicy meatball, Matt. Such a scorching hot take. Not sure the potato salad with extra mayonnaise crowd can take it.
I stopped reading MattY willingly after the Bangladeshi sweatshop factory collapse and his resulting glibertarian approval of such horrific conditions that led to the collapse, which was illegal even by the standards he was judging them by. But when you start talking about the “moral calculus” we make as societies while ignoring the people and their lives and deaths, their stories, and you’re just lazily using this event as a way to sling your hot take of the nanosecond, then it’s time to stop writing and start reflecting on YOUR moral calculus, where peoples’ lives and deaths mean so little to you that it’s just another way get your daily troll on with your own readers.
It was that moment I realized MattY was just like McArdle, Sullivan, Friedersdorf, Chait, and the rest of the “moderate” crowd and just how ghoulish these so-called “thinkers” really are. If slinging hot takes puts you into a position where you’re like, “Oh, wait, you don’t understand, these people HAD to die and it’s actually a good thing they died this way,” then I don’t want to read anyone who has such a bizarre lack of empathy.
James E Powell
@Subsole:
This has been shown to be true several times with the FTFNYT. If I recall correctly, no one apologized for it.
I can’t speak for newspapers, but people I know in the local TV news business assure me that the reporters always know exactly who they are interviewing & what that person will say. So it’s not “talk to some random person on the street to see what they think about schools being closed,” but “find a woman who will say she is angry at Biden because schools were closed.”
I was interviewed by local NPR in Los Angeles when we had the vote on the Valley seceding. I was selected because I voted against it. The reporter had me edit my remarks twice – because I’m a windy son of a bitch – so that it would fit in the time she wanted.
It’s not the news, it’s “the news” program.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@James E Powell: I haven’t heard her name in a while (blessedly) but the briefly fashionable Salena Zito had a knack for finding independent voters who were just so darn disappointed that Democrats weren’t willing to give poor President trump a chance. And somehow all those independent voters always seemed to have the same names and hometowns of local Republican office-holders and party officials.
and don’t get me started on the 14 YO French girl who deplored the polarized state of American politics at a highway rest-stop, in perfect English
David Anderson
@MisterDancer: I want to extend on this as well:
More notably, writing on demand about a wide variety of fields and doing it well is extraordinarily challenging!
I can write on demand on 2 or 3 very narrow subjects. As soon as I start talking about Medicare, I’m outside of my expertise. I know that if I write 1500 words a day on Medicare for a week, I am going to get something wrong to really wrong within a week. I also know that the thing that I get wrong on Medicare won’t be immediately obvious to non-experts (glaringly so for experts) as I can and do write with a good amount of confidence based on my well earned ACA expertise that barely translates to Medicare expertise.
Now this is a real challenge and it gets worse if post 1 for the day is on health insurance, post 2 is on Ukraine and post 3 is on a small public college in Florida.
The number of people who have legit expertise or at least are connected to the people with legit expertise on those three subjects is tiny…. General purpose punditry is a sucker’s game if there is any value on getting things reasonably close to right.
Chip Daniels
People like Yglesias, Brooks, Gladwell and others are catnip for these sorts of TED talk, corporate management types who love to tell us they have the Secret To Success when all they are really doing is, as you say, confirming the priors of the people who pay their bills.
different-church-lady
@Subsole: “If you look around the table and you can’t tell who the volleyball is, it’s you.”
different-church-lady
@David Anderson:
See, the way it gets written up he sounds like a polymath, when he’s really just a professional “thought-haver”. Kind of like Jack Handy without the humor.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
I got banned from a Matt blog because I said I thought Megan McArdle looked like she smelled bad.
different-church-lady
@Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937: Well, you should get banned for that.
And you should be proud of getting banned for that.
kalakal
@James E Powell:
One time I was interviewed by a local tv station ( nothing political, just a library public 3d printing program) .
It was a 15 minute interview, for reasons beyond me they changed my prognostications from
“I don’t think that…” to “I think that…”
I couldn’t believe it
different-church-lady
@kalakal: It’s only one word off!
kalakal
@different-church-lady:
Perhaps I’m overly picky
Starfish
@Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937: DougJ, is that you?
brantl
@oldster: I’m sorry, but he’s an idiot. He can’t even do simple math. And then writes an argument about the math. What a tool.
Ms. Deranged in AZ
As usual I’m really late to this thread but I stopped following Matt on Twitter quite a long time ago because I couldn’t stomach his occasional misogynist tweets.
Simon
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: He last worked at Vox, an online media company famous for its “explainers”, which he co-founded with Ezra Klein and Melissa Bell. Vox website is https://www.vox.com/.
Simon
@lowtechcyclist: I thought the New York Times was left wing? What are some newspapers I can read that provide left wing views of major stories? I know Wall Street Journal is considered conservative? Is Washington Post the left wing one?
Feckless
In 2003 Yglesias said we should invade Iraq.
Fuck. That. Guy.
Q.E.D.