What’s wrong with Matt Yglesias?

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

This is a very good take down of everything that makes Matt Yglesias so stupid:

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

Post external references

  1. 1
    https://defector.com/celebrated-public-intellectual-attempts-matt-yglesias-math-falls-down-open-manhole/
  2. 2
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2023/01/11/matt-yglesias-slow-boring-in-bidens-washington/
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