I don’t think anyone anywhere could possibly benefit from more Matt Yglesias
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Largely agree except I actually liked his last two standup special. 
What tweet is that? I googled but can’t find it and Yglesias wrote an entire article arguing that Democrats should be interested in the votes of Rogan and people like him, and that the sort of purity testing which rejected this would make building a coalition impossible.
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(no, that’s not in response to you, Chris; the tweet being deleted obviously makes it more difficult to find, but I’ll see what I can do.)
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lolololololol, extremely good burn
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I’m not sure why you’re jumping ugly with me, I said Y was the kind of guest Rogan needs more of, not that Y was the Glenn Greenwald to my KEEEEED.
An education? Informed opinions? No conspiracies? I’m not likely to hear a cataract of white male grievance? He’s not: Ben Shapiro, Dan Crenshaw, Douglas Murray, Wesley Hunt, Jordan Peterson, or the afore mentioned Glenn Greenwald? Rogan would also benefit from having a lot more real left folks on as well, but from time to time he gets some; he has had about 0 traditional liberal commentators on, if Y qualifies as one.
Sounds like he’s wrong about privatizing the post office, has he recanted this? You may have me confused with somebody who closely follows him. Beyond the title, I don’t know anything about this 1 billion babies book he wrote. I would have thought one of the mechanisms for that would be vastly increasing immigration, which I would very much support.
I’m going to deescalate this, but you have no reason to think I read his twitter feed to make myself better about anything, I only occasionally read his twitter feed. I don’t know enough about him to characterize his views as pseudointellectual, obviously possible, but maybe they are intellectual but just wrong?
If he doesn’t want politics to help people, then fuck him. If I listen to his Rogan thing, this will be by far the most sustained exposure I’ve had to him. Perhaps I’ll conclude he is a derper. Good enough?
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That’s a fair enough point, I just think Yglesias is really stupid and his politics are often dishonest or morally atrocious, a guy whose entire career is owed to being a Yale legacy and to being a right-place-right-time blogger.
He gave us this all-time classic about how it’s good that Bangladeshi factory standards are lax, because it keeps his Brooks Brothers khakis cheap.
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Yeah that’s a pretty horrible piece.
The current system of letting different countries have different rules is working fine. American jobs have gotten much safer over the past 20 years, and Bangladesh has gotten a lot richer.
I’m not in love with this at all.
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Saying Yglesias is stupid, or a legacy, or went to Yale are more a reflection on you than on him. He’s one of like 5 genuinely smart people in mainstream media.
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I’ve read plenty enough of what he has to say to know otherwise
Sorry you’re easily duped. I guess he is smart enough to fool you that he is smart, at least. Speaking of things that say more about you than him.
Also note that I actually provided evidence of his vacuousness where you just have ad hominem.
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Gonna need a list of who’s acceptable pretty soon. Maybe make it a sticky?
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Agree. The guy has a few bad takes, but most are good, and re: the topic of his intelligence, the guy is fluent in seemingly all areas of policy to a granular level. The Weeds is legit informative, would recommend the recent episode about Biden’s Homeland Security pick. Even if you hate his heartless neolib conclusions or whatever (way overblown, pretty sure he voted for Bernie in the primary), saying he’s dumb is a bit ridiculous.
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any time now, because so far the case seems to be “well i say he’s smart and therefore he is”
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There’s a group of the kind of “pundit class” (Silver, Yglesias) that for some reason feel they need an opinion about everything, and need to tweet about it. You absolutely do not have to do this!
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I don’t like Glesias all that much but I really like that he dgaf about going on Glenn Beck, Joe Rogan, whoever, to talk about his book.
I don’t know about all that, haven’t read his book. But I just think its refreshing that a guy on the establishment left isn’t afraid to go on to talk to all these proscribed people when he knows that others on the establishment left will say DON’T TALK TO HIM!!!
Yeah honestly I dunno how to call a guy smart when he spent all this time writing a book for a proposal that’s so batshit divorced from material reality
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Gotta say, “do this homework assignment or I will continue to call you a duped idiot” is not my favorite style of posting.
Most Matt Yglesias takes are just standard takes you find here. I don’t read all his written work. I’ve read some Vox stuff, but mainly know him from the Weeds podcast, where he speaks knowledgeably about interesting topics and offers a generally progressive perspective. The case that Yglesias is some massive liar who wants to destroy progressives, idk man, it seems ridiculous to me. I Googled Yglesias Medicare for All, and found an article from January 2007 in which Yglesias calls for single payer healthcare and then says since this is probably going to be politically impossible, Dems should expand Medicare and Medicaid rather than try to do some complicated scheme with the insurance companies.
Seems pretty smart for 2007.
He and his website Vox have run other pro-Medicare for All pieces. Somebody recently posted a tweet of his that was like “absolutely Biden should cancel student debt” (which I actually disagree with, but that position is considered progressive), so like idk what to tell people on this forum who think he’s an idiot conservative ghoul or whatever.
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Yglesias? The guy who writes about how sweatshop conditions are no big deal? The dude who made light of the Native American genocide a month ago? He sucks.
Of course that second part is probably a positive for Liz Lads
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