The guy swimming is my favorite too.
It also drives home just how slow swimming is when you have a regular guy, even one who looks fit, in street clothes swimming through open water.
Fighting is not the answer.
Sneaking up behind unsuspecting people and murdering tweeting about them is the answer.
Frum or maybe Yggles on the need for MMA classes in white elementary schools in 3, 2,....
I liked the commentary soundtrack in the last one. Mollywhopper is a great word.
It really comes down to conditioning.
Also, I looked to see who the police arrested. NPR and CBS both say that 4 warrants have been issued, I guess police were reticent about saying who they're planning to arrest. There were a few linked videos of white folks getting detained, but the news summaries didn't say anything at all about who was arrested.
Also also, DJT spoke in Montgomery a few hours before this happened.
For some reason I assumed it said somewhere this was in Philadelphia, but fortunately I went back to check.
I don't think this kind of thing would stay gunless in Philadelphia.
Also bigger boats, so more chances for someone with a gun to show up.
Philadelphia has bigger boats. I did that one backward.
+1 to 8. Apparently Philly nightclub practice is armed guard patdown and ID imaging, the last to be able to identify anyone shot/shooting.
To be fair, I don't know what Philadelphians do when recreationally boating.
I saw these commentsa on the brawl by Baratunde Thurston
It was shocking, entertaining, at times hilarious, and also scary and sad. Thankfully no serious weapons were used (other than that folding chair). I find that to be shocking in our gun-saturated country, and a relief. Spill, Instagram, and what's left of Twitter had a field day with memes. The swimmer was dubbed Aquamayne and Scuba Gooding Jr. and more. Police are investigating. Lots of Black folks are celebrating the resistance of those involved. This dock fight means something when we've been subjected to modern images of white racial violence targeting Black folks in a nation that has historically condoned, encouraged, and depended on white mob violence to destroy Black humanity. We've always resisted, sometimes at our further peril. But Saturday night in Montgomery represented a non-lethal example of folks standing up and saying, "Not today." Just remember how it started: a group of white men physically assaulted a Black dock worker who was just doing his job. Those white dudes fucked around and found out for sure. Aquanda Forever!
13 they're checking for D cell batteries
15 is the academic fig leaf I needed to justify this post! Thank you.
Yes, +1 to 8, sadly.
My work meeting yesterday started off with three Black colleagues chortling over the mess and retelling the story to the rest of us. The one who has family in Montgomery said that it was absolutely not a coincidence that 45 had just been to the city.
16. 9volt has the corners plus the sharp cathode
Ah, so this is the chair thing I keep seeing!
A society with lots of chairs is a polite society.
A society with lots of chairs is a polite society.
There was a paper connecting racial violence to Trump rallies, but I thought I also remembered its analysis being debunked in some way.
Phelps apparently swam at a top pace of 6mph, or a 10 minute mile. The 1500m record (.93 miles) is 14:31, which translates to something like 15:35 over a mile. Meanwhile a 15 minute mile makes you slow as hell. A fast walking pace (like for a normal person, not a professional speed-walker) is up to 4mph. Swimming is very slow!
Ah, some Harvard PhD candidates replicated the analysis (2019) and found it only worked by not adjusting for population, and of course candidates go to more populous counties that have more hate crimes. Though they published their results on Reason.com; and the original paper was formally published in 2022, so maybe they fixed that problem.
I think my last sentence was written very unclearly. The debunkers published their debunking on Reason.com, which makes me suspect it on general principles; the original paper got a peer-reviewed publication a few years later.
I'm inherently skeptical of reason.com, but I might be even more inherently skeptical of eye-catching social science research. If it makes headlines it's almost certainly wrong, the incentives to do shoddy but "exciting" research are out-of-control.
If anyone has academic article access.
Heartily agree with 27, and shoddy analysis of precisely that form--failing to correct for fairly obvious factors--is absolutely essential to the genre of eye-catching social science research. A repeated example is looking at population growth/decline without looking at 3 distinct streams: natural increase/decrease, domestic migration, int'l migration.
Meanwhile, 4.1 is a classic of random Yglesias slander. I've never seen him write anything that could be remotely characterized as "white people need to be prepared for the coming race war", but he's pointed out flawed stats used by police abolitionists, so he's basically a Nazi now. Amazing.
To the OP, I saw someone saying the aftermath was like Black Twitter circa 2011, and while I wasn't using Twitter at all back then, it was definitely a throwback to the sort of joyous, cross-referential discourse you could see ~5 years ago. Dulce Sloan has been a good clearinghouse for funny stuff.
Meanwhile, 4.1 is a classic of random Yglesias slander. I've never seen him write anything that could be remotely characterized as "white people need to be prepared for the coming race war", but he's pointed out flawed stats used by police abolitionists, so he's basically a Nazi now. Amazing.
That's fair, but he's not exactly covering himself in glory with this Hanania stuff, so.
I've never seen him write anything that could be remotely characterized as "white people need to be prepared for the coming race war"
If the "him" were anybody less careless and lazy, I'd agree that he doesn't deserve to be taking all the flak he's getting right now.
Now we're stereotyping white people as careless and lazy.
Please, it's just a generalization based on statistical analysis.
But since when has being careless and lazy meant your a Nazi? Like sure he's a bit glib, so like don't follow him if glibness annoys you, but it's not a hate crime to be glib.
He engages with and thereby platforms white supremacists because apparently he finds some of their ideas worth taking seriously. Fuck him.
It's incredible how much attention Yglesias soaks up. At least as talented as McArdle, I'd think.
I don't read him, but the few journalist twitter accounts I check on every now and then mention him more often than seems worth doing, usually via quote/retweet (not of him)/reply.
That's fair, but he's not exactly covering himself in glory with this Hanania stuff, so.
What does this mean?
I agree he's not exactly covering himself in glory, but I can be sympathetic to the way he presents his perspective on the situation (approximately, "I'm getting a lot of criticism, much of it over-the-top, and it feels like spending time on this is counterproductive.") That's clearly petulant and defensive, but also completely understandable, so I don't see how it follows to say, "he's being petulant and defensive in response to a mix of valid and exaggerated criticism therefore we should just lob random criticisms at him and see if that helps." (which is sort of how I read your final ", so.")
26: you're
I assume that's to 36 (and making the joke that being careless makes one a Nazi). </standpipe>
The brawl has already been commemmorated in reenactment.
41: Try that in a small town.
In other (sad) news from Philadelphia, a 70-year-old woman used a sword cane to kill an adult man who had had an earlier altercation with her family member.
30. Fair if he deserves defending. I find choosing Hanania as an example worthy of attention and a thoughtful word pretty strange. I guess I'd have more sympathy if he was sloppy and attention-seeking occasionally against voter suppression, against idiot R's destroying a state's public universities or attacking faculty they dislike. He's apparently doing well on substack, what's the incentive for hime to continue shooting from the hip and generally against left targets? For over a year now, everything I've read that he's written seems unfortunate.
You're right that I'm ascribing to him something he hasn't said, similarly Frum. Perhaps I'm being unfair. Is there an instance in the last 12 months where anything either of them has written was worth reading? For Yggles, not interested in merely clever takedowns. He has no incentive to hurry. For Frum, anything non-horrible, in his mouth middlebrow bleating about can't we all just get along is horrible unless he clearly points out a problem on the right. I don't want Hanania destroyed, but there's nothing there, he's a hack not worth defending-- he can return to obscurity chastened and a better person if his opinions have genuinely changed, he doesn't need to retain any influence to improve morally. Ted Cruz phonebanked for Trump, maybe Hanania could help Stacy Abrams out. Just drop the sublject, he's at besta formerly poisonous nobody, silence is the best response. I'm exhausted by plausibly deniable right-leaning "thinkers" "just asking questions" and expressing my frustration here, among other people who read and who have some awareness of the structural problems with cultural production, which Y seems to me a pretty good symptom of. If these two have a right-leaning audience, then they have platforms they can use to weaken McConnell, to mock assholes who give to the Federalist society, to mock the current editors of Quillette and pointedly suggest they resign to free a place for someone better after fucking this one up.
46. I drove right by there eariler in the summer. It's two blocks from the Haverford campus, a stone's throw from Bryn Mawr. No mugshot in the story.
30 furher; basically the only hope for the future of the US is a viable nonpoisonous republican polity. If these writers want that audience and I guess they do, then probably they could say something to improve the situation with those people, they're clever and whatever Frum is respectively. Have they? (what kind of profiling of subscribers does substack offer its writers, does anyone know? Other stuff they're subscribed to on substack eg)
What does this mean?
Just that Hanania has always been an obvious racist trying to launder his weird extremist ideas into polite discourse through engagement with "reasonable centrists" like Yglesias, who have for whatever reason been only too happy to oblige. It's not just Hanania, either; Yglesias has been engaging off and on with guys like Steve Sailer for decades. I don't think Matt's actually a Nazi or white supremacist or anything, but he has a pattern of treating these guys like reasonable thinkers with some unfortunate blind spots when that's really not justifiable.
47: if you honestly think Yglesias is being too soft on Florida Republicans because he secretly sympathises with them, you have cavity wall foam in your head.
So 4 is perhaps unfair to MY, but he hasn't earned a lot of benefit of the doubt on these issues and a bit of exaggerated mockery is a reasonable reaction.
Also, all of us know about this because at some level we are aware of what black people talk about with each other publicly (or today what people one step removed talk about). The real insult, which maybe a=was too subltle, was the "3,2,...." suggesting that F and Y havent heard about it yet for .... some reason.
Is there an instance in the last 12 months where anything either of them has written was worth reading?
That's always going to be a subjective judgement, but I appreciated Don't Overthink Poverty In The United States (summary: anti-poverty programs work, the biggest reason why the US has relatively high poverty rates is because it has relatively low taxes and a relatively small welfare state).
It does feel like Matt is very willing to cut people off from consideration as fundamentally unserious for, say, being a vacancy truther -- which is independently understandandable -- in a way he wasn't for Hanania.
50. I don't care about his secrets, I care about what he says publicly. I've stopped seeking his writing out-- is there anything good in the last year? Asking because I haven't looked and would like to know if I'm being unfair, but not at the cost of reading garbage.
On a different Philly note, Terrill Haigler's insta is a positive thing in Philly.
54: Right, it's not like he (or anyone) is adhering to a philosophy of "listen to and engage with literally everyone." Who he does and doesn't cut off indicates something meaningful about his priorities and values.
So 4 is perhaps unfair to MY, but he hasn't earned a lot of benefit of the doubt on these issues and a bit of exaggerated mockery is a reasonable reaction.
I occasionally defend Yglesias in these threads but I would freely acknowledge that he can be extremely irritating and has deliberately achieved a position of relative prominence (and now financial success) in part by being a sarcastic scold (sometimes of the left and sometimes of the right), so I think it's fair that he gets a reasonable amount of sarcasm directed back at him. But I find it weird when he's invoked as an abstract figure of general badness.
53. Thanks! 57. Fair point. I was mostly reacting to a tweet of his about Hanania yesterday, and like I say have stopped actively looking.
Just that Hanania has always been an obvious racist trying to launder his weird extremist ideas into polite discourse through engagement with "reasonable centrists" like Yglesias, who have for whatever reason been only too happy to oblige. It's not just Hanania, either; Yglesias has been engaging off and on with guys like Steve Sailer for decades. I don't think Matt's actually a Nazi or white supremacist or anything, but he has a pattern of treating these guys like reasonable thinkers with some unfortunate blind spots when that's really not justifiable.
It does feel like Matt is very willing to cut people off from consideration as fundamentally unserious for, say, being a vacancy truther -- which is independently understandandable -- in a way he wasn't for Hanania.
Both of those things are true. I also think this from John Holbo is good at summarizing the fact that there's a spectrum of circumstance that affects whether engagement is endorsement (and I do think the final line in this quote is an appropriate place to land on).
Should Hanania be cancelled?
There is a norm that you don't sit down with a Nazi. That is fine, I think, and consistent with being a good, Millian liberal, which I hope I more or less am.
But ideas and arguments are different. I wouldn't break bread with Carl Schmitt - or Heidegger - but I'll read their books.
I totally admit 'I won't shake your hand but I'll read your book' gets kind of hopeless, when pushed. But what's the alternative, really? Pretending I know it all? I don't believe immoral ideas are miasma that infects you if you touch them with your mind.
But: you should massively discount Hanania's ideas and arguments just because he is dishonest.
53. Thanks!
Thanks. FWIW, I didn't spend much time looking, but it felt more difficult to find something within the last 12 months than I think it would have been a couple years ago (in part because more of his writing is behind the paywall). I do think he has drifted into spending more time writing about (more or less) things that annoy him and less time engaging with broader public policy stories. I wonder if substack encourages a smaller range of writing (playing more to his existing audience).
you should massively discount Hanania's ideas and arguments just because he is dishonest.
As a general point, because I don't even think I've heard Hanania's name before this thread: I think it's pretty universally warranted to refrain at some point from charitable engagement with someone who is never really going to reciprocate, will never openly wonder if their own beliefs and convictions are deeply flawed, and doesn't approach major questions in a spirit of ever-renewing skepticism and wonder. I'm not the charity monster.
One thing I'm very confused about is that I'd literally never heard of this guy before this week (and I follow Yglesias on Twitter!). Was he really well-known? I also feel like Yglesias's engagement with him is pretty minor, given I follow him and hadn't heard of the guy.
with someone who is never really going to reciprocate, will never openly wonder if their own beliefs and convictions are deeply flawed, and doesn't approach major questions in a spirit of ever-renewing skepticism and wonder
I'm with you for #1, but #2 (*deeply* flawed? What about just *somewhat* flawed?) and especially #3 seems pretty demanding -- my skepticism and wonder certainly have their limits! OTOH I guess I also just don't have the mental energy for charitable engagement anymore in general, either, so I suppose setting the bar super high for that isn't actually a problem. Carry on!
Like is the whole thing about this one tweet?
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1688311666524504066?s=46&t=vLUe1pgWSc_w_lyk5Bs2xQ
62: "Really well known" is perhaps overstating it, but he's been published in mainstream publications and gone viral a few times for saying explicitly racist stuff, and the combination of those two things has been pointed out from time to time. His old pseudonymous racist writings being revealed recently mostly triggered a lot of people noting how unsurprising that was, but the reaction of certain centrist pundits including but not limited to Yglesias was more defensive because they had treated him as a reasonable if mistaken interlocutor. I don't think Yglesias specifically interacted with him all that much, but he's very much part of that world.
But Yglesias's reaction was also to say it's unsurprising! I'm genuinely confused about what the controversy is.
64: Not just that one tweet, but that tweet does indicate that Yglesias is familiar with and sympathetic to Hanania even though he doesn't generally agree with him ideologically. That's a level of charity that's generally admirable to extend to ideological opponents who are within the same broad range of socially acceptable views, and implies that Yglesias considers Hanania's views to be socially acceptable in that sense even if they're mistaken.
Whereas other people who are familiar with Hanania see his views as so extreme as to be beyond the pale and not within the range of social acceptance. That's the controversy.
I first became aware of Hanania when people were talking about an essay he'd written on his (retrograde) positions on gender. I read it, spent a while mentally arguing with it and then eventually decided, one the basis of that one piece, that there wasn't any point. He presented himself as someone mulling over his own internal feelings and logic so as to be able to engage more honestly with the questions, but I decided the second half of that (honest engagement) was a sham.
But, given he's in the news now, this appears to be a good summary of the case against him.
63: well, exactly. But I think there is a set of contrarians who want this treatment from their interlocutors, but are in no position to return it, as well as a set of interlocutors who try much harder to oblige than is sensible. We've definitely seen this dynamic here. (We have also seen, much more often, people actually changing their minds and modifying their views.)
I just looked at the titles of his substack's articles. Not bad, definitely better than what I've been seeing from him in retweets, retweets are not a fair way to judge a person's work, those select for high heat:light. Also his response to success on substack has been to bring on other people who don't shoot from the hip. If I had looked before posting, I would have written something different, or chosen a different name to put next to Frum. I'll think more carefully when I try for topical humor next time.
Arguably even if Hanania's overt racism was out in the open for discerning readers, it made sense in the social media age to hype it like a new discovery (which the previous pseudonymous stuff in fact was), to give it more legs as a story. Who shares along something like "Everyone has been ignoring how totally racist this guy is all the time!"?
And it worked at least a little: Bari Weiss's outfit disavowed him.
Not that anyone's keeping track, but Y seems to me a pretty good symptom of in my 47 is too harsh, the substack looks OK from the outside. His retweeted opinions are bitchy and antagonistic, but that's what people respond to. No idea how to assess how often his targets are leftish, if he gets into twitter arguments with right-leaning people I don't see those. That'll teach me to try to be pick up on vibes.
68: I mean he literally says he's crazy in the tweet. It's weird to read that as favorable.
The thing is of all white pundits, MY is the only one who lives in black neighborhood, sends his kid to a black school, and got Ta-Nehisi Coates an early break. And lots of white people who live in white bubbles want to go after him on race, it's ridiculous.
I mean he literally says he's crazy in the tweet. It's weird to read that as favorable.
He also says he's "a smart guy with interesting things to say" and that it's unfortunate that he's also crazy and "imprisoned" by a "tendency toward wild overstatement"! It's not agreement, but it's definitely sympathy.
The thing is of all white pundits, MY is the only one who lives in black neighborhood, sends his kid to a black school, and got Ta-Nehisi Coates an early break. And lots of white people who live in white bubbles want to go after him on race, it's ridiculous.
Yeah, I mean, I do agree that singling out Yglesias among the pundits on this issue is weird; he does walk the walk and is generally fine personally on racial issues that don't interfere with his other hobbyhorses. Pace lw somewhere upthread, he knows lots of Black people in real life and that definitely influences his punditry in productive ways (that don't necessarily align with left-wing consensus btw). But he really does also have a long history of engaging in a weirdly sympathetic way with avowed white supremacists and that's worth calling out.
'Sends his kid to a Black school.'
An HBCU?
A public school? You mean a school that has Black students?
This is heroic somehow?
He is very clear that he doesn't GAF if someone wants to ethnically cleanse Latinos or put innocent people in jail or regards Black people as animals.
It's not his problem. He doesn't care.
Are we supposed to be impressed or something because his kid actually sits in a room with Black people? Or he talks to Black people?
How difficult do you think it is to do those things?
57: But I find it weird when he's invoked as an abstract figure of general badness.
Maybe it's because I belong to one of his targeted groups ("let's forcibly relocate gov't employees") but to me he is tangibly, specifically bad.
"He is very clear that he doesn't GAF if someone wants to ethnically cleanse Latinos or put innocent people in jail or regards Black people as animals."
Come on, you know this is completely ridiculous. I hate the internet these days. You've completely lost your mind.
And yes, actually talking to black people puts you ahead of the vast majority of liberals no matter how many signs about black people they put in their yards in all-white neighborhoods. There's a reason that Joe Biden was the candidate that Black Americans chose, because actually spending time with Black people and treating them with respect is more important than knowing the right ways to whine to other white people about race.
79 is funny, but also correct!
Like I get why people criticize MY on trans issues, he's genuinely not good there. And 77 is a perfectly good reason to object (though I personally think he's right on that count, though one would need to take care in how to go about it). But 76, and most of the criticism of MY that I've seen in the current controversy, just seems completely unhinged.
This is the first I heard most of this stuff. I'm trying to pay attention to less.
A lot of energy over the past 4 years has gone into coming up with approaches to "anti-racism" that are compatible with everyone being white. (For example, this is why Deans are so into diversity statements, it lets them say they're doing anti-racist stuff while not hiring Black people.) Of course the biggest driver of this is that lots of white liberals are afraid to send their kids to a school with Black kids, which is why they live in all-white neighborhoods. Another big reason is that Democratic voters of color are well to the right of typical white democrats (including to the right of white democrats on "racial issues" in most polls!), and giving power to actual Black people often means moving rightwards. But it's all ridiculous, at the end of the day if you're not giving power, money, and influence to actual Black people then it doesn't matter how much time you spend writing anti-racism fanfic.
I just went over to twitter and MY's most recent retweet is:
https://twitter.com/MGPforCongress/status/1661509165523640326
And hey, look if the replies aren't a bunch of lefties real mad that two women of color are more moderate than they are! But I bet they shun all conservatives too, so that makes them good I guess.
I have been mostly trying not engage with people about Yglesias, but, yeah, I am also with Upetgi. He's an annoying dick (and I mean this in the sense that I'm fairly sure he means to be, that's his schtick. I find that kind of thing less annoying than most do, but I can see it). And there are certainly issues where I don't agree with him. But many people on the left, many of whom I'm fond of, have beliefs about how completely pernicious he is that don't seem to me to tie back tightly (or even in a loose but still legitimate way) to anything he's actually said.
Eh, 76 has one line that veers into hyperbole and the rest is complaints about de facto segregation that is very, very, very common in "liberal America" in the name of education and which people really can't call out often enough. Also, I doubt that 84 is remotely news to the author of 76, but I can let them speak for themselves. (Themself? Descriptive grammar here is not yet clear to me, alas.)
||
I am also trying to pay attention to less, and so I didn't read this horror story about Paris Baguette until now. Tonight's red-bean-bun-as-anti-nausea-medicine was sourced from a local chain (and apparently very effective).
|>
Life is short. Too short for contrarian bullshit, much less Nazi sympathizers.
LATE BREAKING UPDATE TO THE OP: I wasn't doing excessive research, but I happened to see Inside Edition. The initial victim wasn't a security guard or dockworker as had been reported, but the cocaptain of the riverboat, which had finished a dinner cruise and had been delayed for 45 minutes by the motorboat being in its docking space. So figure 100 or so people who had bene eating and drinking, incresingly anxious about not getting home to their babysitters by that time. This explains why so many poeple were taking videos. Cocaptain jumped off the riverboat onto the dock to tell the assholes to move their watercraft. Also, the swimmer was a 16-year-old employee of the river boat, trying to assist his own boss. And form another source: the white guys own a chain of convenience stores in the area and are worried about losing their customer base.
Biggest surprise to me: there's a big river in Montgomery Alabama. I had no idea.
Huh, you're never going to guess what the river is called! (I'm actually pretty embarrassed to have not ever heard of this river before, I'm over 75% in geography at LearnedLeague!)
Google maps also says Montgomery has a Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald museum.
Also not that invested in yggles meta-discourse but holy fuck did he just lay one down on the annoying dick/raging misogynistic fuckpig access (choose your adventure):
Tweet:
The conservative position on abortion is unpopular but the other thing Republicans need to accept is that the weirdly timed election gimmick now plays into the hands of Democrats' highly educated neurotic base.
My own biggest beef with him (and Josh Barro*) is a hugely idiosyncratic specific but highly flammable issue.
*When they run together I think of them as the Legacy Brothers.
90: It gets overshadowed by the Tombigbee River with which it joins just north of Mobile to be the Mobile River* (which I always forget). All arbitrary name changes--and the Alabama might be better known if its main headwaters stream was not separately named the Coosa. (Although the Alabama is the river the Pettis Bridge crossed.)
*Not to mention the Mobile splits downstream and has another outlet to Mobile Bay called the Tensaw River.
Speaking of Ohio, I was hoping 'No' would reach 60% but looks like will be about 57%.
Back to the dock fight, I have to admit that I took great, uncomplicated pleasure in seeing physically aggressive drunk rednecks getting the living shit kicked out of them in public and on camera after starting the fight. And the folding chair? Chef's kiss. I wanted so much more of that.
I probably learned about Hanania from the Know Your Enemy podcast. I didn't know what age he was, just that he's a right-winger who apparently gets treated seriously outside the right as he was purported to be intellectual in some sense. The way they he got mentioned every now and then on the podcast suggested to me that he wasn't actually an intellectual or worth taking seriously, just some dumb guy benefiting from the right's media welfare operations, who could mostly be ignored except for the fact that some people who also probably should be ignored thought he was worth engaging. Occasionally, I saw people dunking on him for being racist in the way that people can be racist, right-wing, purported to be intellectual, and yet still treated seriously by people who think of themselves as responsible, centrist, open to debate, and completely close-minded about what constitutes racism in public discourse.
I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not that surprised about how things have gone down since the expose. But I probably would have been if I didn't make occasional half-hearted attempts to pay attention to what's going on in right-wing media. Mostly through listening to Know Your Enemy.
Also, I can't believe how awful so many people's twitter accounts can be relative to their longer form writing outputs. Maybe twitter is where they put all the stuff that would make the long form writing worse.
Earlier we were treated to a Yggles tweet calling the Democratic base that came out to defend reproductive health care "neurotic."
This guy's an s tier asshole and that's long been the case.* You don't gotta hand it to him.
*remember that Slate column defending lax labor laws in countries like Bangladesh after over a thousand people died in that factory collapse? Ghoulish to say the least.
Given the dock fight it would have been appropriate if the river had been the Black Warrior, but I guess the Alabama works too. (The Black Warrior flows through Tuscaloosa, which means "Black Warrior" in one of the Muskogean languages. I forget which one.)
I actually think the shit Yglesias is getting for the "neurotic" tweet is slightly unfair given his New York Jewish background, in which context that phrasing has a sort of affectionate in-joke valence. Only slightly though; the term doesn't actually have a positive connotation in general and with the size and composition of his audience he should be aware and mindful of that.
A lot of energy over the past 4 years has gone into coming up with approaches to "anti-racism" that are compatible with everyone being white. (For example, this is why Deans are so into diversity statements, it lets them say they're doing anti-racist stuff while not hiring Black people.) Of course the biggest driver of this is that lots of white liberals are afraid to send their kids to a school with Black kids, which is why they live in all-white neighborhoods. Another big reason is that Democratic voters of color are well to the right of typical white democrats (including to the right of white democrats on "racial issues" in most polls!), and giving power to actual Black people often means moving rightwards.
I think the main reason is simpler: white liberals don't want to give up any of their own power to anyone else.
100: Also, the tweet isn't calling anyone neurotic for being concerned about abortion. It's calling Democrats neurotic in general, and it's saying that the "weirdly timed election gimmick" of the Ohio vote was the kind of thing that would bring the Dem base out because they are people who get freaked out when Republicans are pulling stuff,. It's addressed at concern about anti-small d democratic measures, but it's not saying the concern is unjustified, just that the Dem base gets very concerned about that kind of thing, and it's not at all directed at concern about abortion.
This is half of all the reaction to Yglesias -- he says something in kind of an annoying dick kind of way, and the reaction it draws is as if, regardless of the literal (or, you know, the obviously sarcastic) meaning, he wouldn't be speaking in that tone anywhere near an important subject unless he had an evil position about it. Which is simply not true: he tweets in that tone about everything.
I could absolutely see finding his tone annoying enough to ignore him, but people make strong deductions about his real evil beliefs as being very different from his literally stated beliefs and goals on the basis of a consistently annoyingly flippant tone, and I don't think it's well justified.
I haven't read Yglesias since he was at the Atlantic and I'm not going to start again, but there's a lot of really neurotic people around the Democratic party. I mean the OP has hand-wringing about the appropriateness of posting a video where an asshole gets hit by a chair.
Though if the WWE counts as culture, it's cultural appropriation.
I have the pleasure of never having read Yglesias at all, but the abundant evidence indicates that he pollutes the information environment and should be fined $785m or 10% of global revenue, whichever is larger.
93: I am interested in seeing the actual turnout %s in the Prop 1 voting. Some hints early that the bigger urbs were higher relative to the rural areas (or maybe at least than normal in an off election).
As lobsters readily devour members of their own kind, harvesting lobsters within 30 minutes of molting is crucial for farms, Cheng said.
What was this notorious proposition anyway?
106: Meant to add that when Doug Jones in Alabama, his raw %s were not quite as good as he local election watchers thought needed for a victory but the the turnout was much lower in red areas
108: It was a bit meta, whether to establish a 60% instead of 50% bar for referendums. Context being that there is a measure to enshrine abortion rights on the ballot this November.
What do you think about Nathan Robinson interviewing Chris Rufo? He keeps on saying that what Rufo is saying is untrue.
I find Matt Y's career interesting. He has various things published in publications, I guess. But mostly blogging. No particular academic credentials, albeit I read some stuff on the philosophy of math that he pointed me too. Despite the TAP blog, no leadership in any particular political faction. Some TV appearances. I think the books (3?) are more about demonstrating he is serious pundit. I cannot imagine anybody becoming prominent in a previous generation like that.
None of that is meant to be a comment on substance.
The shrine was going to be a roadside monument near Toledo.
But since this amendment failed, it will be in the Ohio constitution.
109/110 me.
Since I introduced the 'neurotic' tweet and judged it harshly I will say that I think the more generous (and probably correct) interpretation is that he was not really even talking about the actual voters in Ohio who turned out (increasing the turnout in the already high turnout "Democrats highly educated neurotic base" doesn't win you shit in Ohio in any election) but rather the notice it attention it gets nationwide. And LB is right mot likely sloppily-directed at small d concerns more than abortion.
However,
1) Given the actual composition of the dem base, and 2) the underlying issue , it was very, very sloppy at best. But am writing that about someone who at least once has posted a screenshot which contained an extraneous dialogue box containing a computer error/alert message) and could eveb outtypo me.
...and thus am i drawn in to the meta-discourse through nothing but my own petard.
"Democrats highly educated neurotic base" doesn't win you shit in Ohio in any election
The Oberlin city council is hurt.
No needing 60% vs. 50% voting FOR a referendum no matter the turnout.
115: No. 50% of the vote is needed to change the constitution now. The amendment was to raise in to 60% of the vote.
Also, in Ohio you can't be pwned unless the time stamps are more than two minutes apart.
Ah, I see he is getting support from Nate "Twitter is better now" Silver in the form of dubious data re political sorting buy neuroticism.
My blanket overgeneralization is that although the arc od contrarian smart boy punditry is long it bends towards assholery.
119: I don't think we're in Ohio anymore Moby.
I'm now in either rural Pennsylvania or suburban Harrisburg. I can't tell.
123: I can't tell.
Because then they'd have to kill you.
I'm wearing a shirt I bought in Ohio back in the 90s.
So I can in principle have myself elected God Emperor of Ohio if I win over as few as 0.5 voters?
My general Ohio electoral triumphalism has been greatly tempered by the exercise of looking at how just the western part of PA (roughly from Altoona west) voted in 2020 and it was pretty similar to Ohio as a whole (maybe a bit more D, but Trump carried it overall somewhat handily IIRC).
I guess if you hold a double secret election and only one person shows up.
That was exactly the Ohio Republican plan.
Rural western PA does have more Trump signs than all the other rural places I've been this year.
Do my eyes deceive me or do the Delaware and the lower Hudson run almost in parallel? And is this a coincidence? Would there were a geographer to hand!
133: I think they are deceiving you a bit. In aggregate the upper Delaware does parallel the relatively straight shot N-S lower Hudson but it does so by king of a zig-zag.
As to coincidence, the geology is very complex in that area so other than there generally being N-S rivers due to the location and timing of the various Appalachian orogenies and the opening and closing of the ocean the precise courses are locally determined. (Rivers in general tend to be geologically long-lived--see the Susquehanna cutting right through age-old mountains.) A river that is "more parallel" to the Hudson is the Connecticut.
Please expound Professor!
Speaking of age-old: the wiki suggests the Congo and Amazon might have been the same river on Gondwana (?) but expalins nothing.
136: Off to play pickleball. (Some more discussion later in the day.)
120.2: the arc of contrarian smart boy punditry is long it bends towards assholery.
I should have said reactionary assholery, its roots are already firmly embedded in general assholery.
I'm both so glad I blocked Nate Silver, who drives me crazy on Twitter, and utterly bereft that 538's soccer forecasts are down.
Rural Pennsylvania has gender-inclusive restrooms with pro-trans graffiti on the tampon dispenser.
But people openly admit to seeking employment in investment banking.
Anyway, if MY drives you crazy, I'd recommend blocking him and moving on with your life. I enjoy MY but hate Nate Silver, and so I've blocked Nate Silver, and my life is better for it. Follow people whose tweets you enjoy and block the ones you don't.
142 strikes me as sage advice. But so, too, does not worrying too much about people criticizing a controversial (controversies are a cultivated part of his brand, let's remember) pundit whose work you like. I have many good friends who enjoy Yglesias's writing and/or like him personally. By contrast, I've never been able to get past him signal-boosting racists and McCardles--but I repeat myself--being shockingly sloppy and a glibertarian--but I repeat myself--and, if I'm not mistaken, participating in a recent transphobic frenzy while positioning himself as just asking questions about what it means for the Democratic coalition to support rights for trans people--but I repeat myself. Do I think any of the above makes Yglesias a Nazi, a racist, or a transphobe? Nope, probably not, and maybe. Please note that that judgement has nothing to do with where he lives or what schools his kids attend.
In the end, I recognize that it's part of his ethos to engage with, and even sometimes befriend, monstrous assholes. But he's not my buddy, so I don't have anything invested in him personally. He's just a general-purpose pundit who's often ill-informed and sometimes cruel--and sometimes smart or funny. Given all of that, I have no use for him. But it's fine if other people like him or like reading him. It's just that I'm more discerning and generally better than those people, obviously.
I think it's pretty universally warranted to refrain at some point from charitable engagement with someone who is never really going to reciprocate
Ah, but Hanania does reciprocate. He praises Yglesias as a public intellectual, and puts him on a discourse continuum with himself and Steve Sailer. Hanania seems correct about that.
I'd be interested to know if Yglesias objects, but his Twitter feed -- even in the wake of the HuffPost piece -- seems to endorse his general comity about being lumped in with Hanania as a substack thinker.
It's been interesting to watch Yglesias degenerate and I (personally) disagree strongly with the suggestion in 142 that we ought not engage with important thinkers whose work is annoying. (I won't apologize for pondering the writings of Donald Trump, for instance. But also: I don't actually follow Yglesias in any meaningful way -- just his Twitter feed and the links I see from people who do follow him.)
Yglesias is not wrong about everything in the Greenwaldian sense, but you can see he's trending in that direction, and I find it useful to reflect on that process.
Yglesisas fundamental schtick is that Obama is good and Democrats should be more like Obama. He's barely trending at all, he has mostly the same opinions he had 15 years ago. He almost never disagrees with Joe Biden. Comparing him to Greenwald is completely detached from reality.
In the real world, there is no Yglesias.
Obama is good and Democrats should be more like Obama. He's barely trending at all, he has mostly the same opinions he had 15 years ago. He almost never disagrees with Joe Biden.
Taken as metonyms for their administrations, Joe Biden and Barack Obama have pretty different policies.
I find Matt Y's career interesting. He has various things published in publications, I guess. But mostly blogging. No particular academic credentials, albeit I read some stuff on the philosophy of math that he pointed me too. Despite the TAP blog, no leadership in any particular political faction. Some TV appearances. I think the books (3?) are more about demonstrating he is serious pundit. I cannot imagine anybody becoming prominent in a previous generation like that.
Well, Matt Y is something new, because he is one of the original political bloggers. But where did pundits come from in the past? I think they were mostly journalists who at some point were given a job writing columns, and at some point some people started taking them seriously for all kinds of usually stupid reasons. I don't know that older generation pundits like Tom Friedman or David Brooks have greater qualifications for expertise.
Also, it's funny to me that we're talking about Saiselgy as if he's just another pundit, not someone with a personal connection to Unfogged. Are there new commenters that don't know this history?
126: You have my vote, mc!
I was contemplating the possibility that I may live to regret the result of this election. It doesn't seem completely crazy to think a majority of Ohio voters might someday vote to declare that Christianity is the official religion of Ohio, just to come up with one somewhat implausible example. Still, it's hard to imagine a situation where I would choose the judgment of our state legislators over the judgment of the voters.
98.3: Somebody who writes as much as Yglesias, and who takes on difficult topics, can be cut a bit of slack, I'm thinking. But as with the Hanania thing, Yglesias had a chance to reflect on the matter, did so, and defended his work. It's a bad look.
It's interesting to me that Uptegi -- who is a smart guy with interesting things to say -- doesn't get the problem with the tweet in 64. Here's the relevant text:
Yeah, you're a smart guy with interesting things to say but unfortunately also a crazy person imprisoned by this kind of tendency toward wild overstatement.
This is his characterization not just of a particular tweet, but of Hanania in general -- an overt, unapologetic public racist. Presented with this in the context of Hanania's well-known racist views, Yglesias doubles down. Essentially: Well, I did call him crazy, after all.
The question (as teo and others have pointed out) is about who we endorse as public intellectuals, and Hanania does not deserve that validation. Let's do the reductio ad Hitlerium: Would the Yglesias tweet be an appropriate thing to say about Hitler? About Trump? About Steve Sailer?
There's a continuum here, and at some point, we have to say that someone's work is beyond the pale -- that we, as decent people, reject it. Hanania's project has been to inject concepts like white supremacy into the mainstream. If you want to characterize him as "a smart guy with interesting things to say," you ought to reflect on your values, and that's what people are correctly asking Yglesias to do. He has declined.
OT: I caught a killed a spotted lantern fly on the wing.
151: Did you report it? https://services.agriculture.pa.gov/SLFReport/
Also, your medal for Hero of the Environment is in the mail.
where did pundits come from in the past?
They tried (but of course failed) to imitate Mike Royko's Sun-Times writing is where they came from, pally.
My only reward is self satisfaction.
I guess I just don't understand what "endorse as public intellectuals" means.
I mean you can't just pretend Trump doesn't exist, for better or worse you have to engage with his existence in some way. Like is this tweet "endorsing Trump as a public intellectual"?
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1686503528963956737
Also, turns out there's a pretty good Detroit band called Mollywop, https://www.mollywopjams.com/
Why bring Trump into it at all? He was President and a current candidate so of course it's important to engage on some level with his 'ideas' and what he represents. Whereas Hanania is just a two-bit garden variety white supremacist. These are not the same things. Any pundit who engages with him is deeply sus, as the kids say today.
It feels like people think that Yglesias writing a tweet calling a guy with a PhD "smart" and linking to one of his articles about how conservative critiques of the media are wrong like somehow made Hanania important or respected. Hanania has a platform because of powerful *conservatives* like Tucker Carlson, JD Vance, and Peter Thiel. No one listens to him because Yglesias once said he's smart but crazy. Yglesias not tweeting about him isn't going to deplatform him in any way.
Again, if saiselgY were "platforming" the guy in any meaningful way I would have heard of him before!
I still have no idea who we are talking about.
I guess I just don't understand what "endorse as public intellectuals" means.
Hanania has an apt discussion of this. Some people ought to be acknowledged as useful contributors to the public conversation -- Steve Sailer, for instance, in Hanania's opinion.
161: We are shielding you, Moby. We want you to retain the childlike innocence of a True Son of the American Heartland.
The thing about Hanania and his ilk (Rufo is another in this class) is that the project they're trying to advance is the injection of extreme right-wing ideas into mainstream discourse. Centrists like Yglesias taking them seriously is a key part of the plan that people like Thiel have for them.
If that's the plan it's hardly working, because again, I'd never heard of the guy before this week.
163: Thank you. I'm exploring a typical rural Pennsylvania town to keep myself humble.
167: No chance of encountering racists there!
There's too much focus on sustainability and diversity to leave room for racism.
Advancing ideas into the mainstream doesn't necessarily mean advancing one's name. I don't care about Yglesias* and Hanania may not actually be that important as an individual at this point** but he's definitely part of that project. I'd assume his book project is/was supposed to be his next big step.
*Who seems kind of tangential in the broader context.
**I wouldn't be surprised if this episode ultimately advances him more than anything he could have done on his own. He's already got supporters claiming he's now seen the error of his ways.
170.last: Yeah, and he had already corrected his error. There are certain conventions you need to follow if you want to be an open racist in polite society. Hanania had already reformed, so it wasn't even really a question of learning his lesson.
In his not-really-an-apology he says this:
People know that what I think is reflected in my corpus of work over the last several years, rather than embarrassing takes in my early 20s about the 2008 election.
He's not wrong.
Tim Burke in John Ganz's substack comments put the broader issue decently:
And of course there are the usual crowd of 'men of reason' eager to help someone launder their reputation because their particular grift is constantly presenting themselves as indispensible bridges between right and left, as trying to rebuild a healthy center whatever the fuck that is, etc.
The thing is, not only are there racists who vote for Democrats, I don't think there are enough other Democrats to win Pennsylvania without them. I have no illusions of rebuilding a healthy center, but not pissing off all of the shitheads at once seems like a good idea.
But at least we're better than Ohio.
The thing about Hanania and his ilk (Rufo is another in this class) is that the project they're trying to advance is the injection of extreme right-wing ideas into mainstream discourse. Centrists like Yglesias taking them seriously is a key part of the plan that people like Thiel have for them.
And of course there are the usual crowd of 'men of reason' eager to help someone launder their reputation because their particular grift is constantly presenting themselves as indispensible bridges between right and left, as trying to rebuild a healthy center whatever the fuck that is, etc.
Thinking about this, I'm reminded of the criticism of Joe Biden for praising segregationist senators. In the case of Joe Biden that was (a) fair criticism but (b) he actually did have a good reason to work with them; he wasn't just saying "so-and-so was a good guy" he was saying "I was better able to accomplish by job because of working with so-and-so."
There are two questions about pundits for which I'm not sure of the answers but mulling over.
First, are there good reasons why it;s helpful for a generalist pundit to engage with a wide range of writers, on the right and left, some of whom they disagree strongly with and that improves their writing and makes them better at their job or, is the reason we see it happening so often because it improves their social status regardless of whether it makes them better at the job (this relates to Holbo saying he would read Heidegger; because it is related to his job).
Second, if it is part of the job of a certain sort of generalist pundit is that a reason to think worse of the entire profession (pundit's are bad) or to see Hanania / Thiel, etc as exploiting for malicious purposes a dynamic which has positive social value in many cases.
My first impulse is to think that is part of the job (and not just a personal quirk of Yglesias), and that it's true that, in practice, there's much less outreach to people associated with leftist activism than conservative activism, but there are still legitimate reasons for the dynamic.
I'm not sure how that should affect our perception of pundits.
173, 174: Yes, 173 brought to mind Tim Ryan's campaign that seemed designed entirely to appeal to shitheads, and he still lost. Some say that a different strategy would have done better, but it's hard to say.
It didn't seem to me that the Fetterman campaign was as focused on shitheads. Did you think he did something to avoid alienating racists?
I didn't campaign in the areas where the racists were. Fetterman sought the votes or poorer people. Rich (or comfortable) white people didn't like Fetterman as much as they liked Shapiro and Shapiro ran many points ahead of Fetterman. But Shapiro's opponent was explicitly fascist.
I heard lots of people ( Democrats voting for Shapiro) tell me they weren't voting for Rep. Lee because I was working my own neighborhood and she's a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause. Fewer people told me they weren't voting for Fetterman, but lots of them made it clear they were only voting for him because of the balance of the Senate. Union people liked Fetterman.
I stopped paying attention to both of them quite some time ago, but I pretty much think of Yglesias as Tom Friedman Jr. Which may be entirely inaccurate because, you know, stopped paying attention.
Not subscribing to the NYT because of the "what about her emails" has done wonders for my not knowing what Friedman thinks.
179: This is totally wrong. It's a horrible insult to Friedman's Mustache to even compare it to what Matt's got going on above his lips.
I just don't think there's a lot of evidence here for "centrists like Yglesias taking them seriously," calling someone crazy isn't exactly taking them seriously.
Fetterman's appearance on its own goes a long way towards making him appealing to a lot of racist voters, also this story was a pretty big deal. And a lot of his rhetoric around the police is not what you'd get from lefty twitter (though, is perfectly normal among centrist Democrats of all races), eg here.
At any rate, Pennsylvania is easier to win than Ohio, I don't think Fetterman would have won in Ohio. But I do think that the project Ygelesias is engaged in is not to try to normalize wacko racists, it's that if you talk more like Biden, Obama, or Clinton, and less like modern activists then you can get racist swing voters to vote for you because they agree with you on other topics like abortion.
I'm just hoping to delay the race war until the migration crisis hits.
I just don't think there's a lot of evidence here for "centrists like Yglesias taking them seriously," calling someone crazy isn't exactly taking them seriously.
I'm honestly baffled. He was talking directly to the guy, unprompted, in public, and said several positive things!
But I do think that the project Ygelesias is engaged in is not to try to normalize wacko racists, it's that if you talk more like Biden, Obama, or Clinton, and less like modern activists then you can get racist swing voters to vote for you because they agree with you on other topics like abortion.
To clarify a little, I definitely don't think MY sees himself as contributing to a project to normalize wacko racism. His role here is "useful idiot" in someone else's plan to do that. As fa said above, the plan is really about the ideas rather than boosting any individual person's profile. I don't read Yglesias enough these days to know if he's actually been playing a significant role in spreading Hanania's ideas, but taking him seriously as a thinker certainly helps normalize him for others in the mainstream.
I'm not actually sure MY sees himself as actively participating in a project to boost Dem electoral prospects by toning down rhetoric about divisive social issues either, actually, though he's certainly not opposed to it. Maybe he does; he is the father of popularism after all. But I think his self-image is as more of a detached observer than an activist.
Welp https://twitter.com/dandrezner/status/1689354640079384576?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
he is the father of popularism after all.
Luigi Sturzo begs to differ.
Yes, Elon Musk is someone whose program is to platform racists whenever possible. He's a very bad person.
Building a bit on what teo said: Yglesias is widely regarded by established journalists as a smart and unconventional thinker, as something of a provocateur, and as someone willing to engage intellectually with thoughtful conservatives. When he has polite conversation with Nazis, no matter how bright they may be (Hitler had great qualities, you know; he loved animals), with McArdles, or with anti-trans activists, he confers upon those people some of his legitimacy and, in doing so, elevates their standing as public intellectuals. This is how discursive communities are constructed.
Having said all of that, I'm not trying to shame anyone for liking Yglesias's writing, though such preferences are obviously shameful. He sometimes says interesting, smart, or funny things. The problem is that he has a brand and is committed to building it, even, it seems, at the cost of normalizing certain kinds of horrific political thinkers.
I was pulling up examples for 185, just searching twitter for "@mattyglesias wisdom of the ancients", and to my surprise it turns out that his famous twitter interaction with Hanania turns out to have come from a post on exactly this topic! (The second link below.)
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1594505456109641728
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1540048660263739392
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1542163278561959936
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1532751555509866497
In the generic WWC suburban precinct at the polling place where I work the D results were:
Shapiro +16
Fetterman dead even
generic D congressional -10
It was Trump +10 in 2020 (an improvement over Trump +18 in 2016)
I think Mastriano just totally flamed out in even friendly suburbia and Fetterman had some attire/attitude appeal.
191: Fair enough! I'm perfectly willing to concede that he does see himself as part of a project to do that. (I actually think he's wrong that such a project is necessary, but that's beside the current point.)
Semi-OT (but related to the strengths and weaknesses of political pundits like MY). Timothy Burke is one of my favorite writers on the internet, but sometimes his political analysis is surprisingly bad
Reproductive rights aren't the only example of public policy where solid national majorities and as much as 4/5 of the states would likely repudiate Republican policies--and likely for that matter even cautious Democratic policy. For example, if you put "free tuition at public universities" on the ballot, or "universal health care", they'd likely win by solid majorities in many states. That's even if all the private equity firms and Big Pharma and the insurers dumped billions in cash in trying to make people fearful, and even if these votes were on concrete well-designed actual implementation plans for those policies.
I don't think that's true (and someone does push back in comments.
Only now are [Democrats] really trying to attach themselves to post-Dobbs campaigning to protect reproductive rights--they had forty years to try and campaign for state-level constitutional protections as a bulwark against the possible overturning of Roe v Wade, often in political environments that would have been friendly to those efforts, and they simply didn't do it.
I think, obviously, that more could have been done to create fall-backs for Roe, but I am very skeptical that it would have been a political winner pre-Trump (and pre-Dobbs). I don't think that Democrats were wrong to think that for most of the last 40 years campaigns for state constitutional ammendments to protect reproductive rights would have required an investment of political resources that competed with other priorities, and it would not have increased the votes available for the Democratic agenda.
Obama's voters--including those who might not normally vote Democratic--wanted those popular positions to become reality, and not in increments or half-measures.That's true for, at a guess, 20-40% of Obama voters. I'd guess the majority of Obama voters wanted "better policies than Republicans without dramatic shifts in policy." You could convince me otherwise, but you'd need to show much stronger evidence than he provides.
Nick@175: I think you're working from the wrong framework. First (as I think you understand) Biden is a different case. He's trying to do things, and in the US democracy, that means you have to engage in a friendly fashion with racists. Moby speaks to this in 173.
More on-point: The critique of Yglesias is not that he engaged with Hanania's ideas or that he read Hanania. I have done that myself. Holbo gets this right when he defines the limits of his engagement with Heidegger.
Outlets like the New York Times get a lot of shit for their engagement with people like Hanania for the same reason Yglesias does. They both tend to legitimize him. The NYT faces a dilemma* on this, given its mandate to expose the public to a wide variety of views. Yglesias and Holbo face no such dilemma, but Yglesias doesn't seem to understand that.
*The NYT often handles this dilemma badly, but for a newspaper, it really is a dilemma.
The NYT faces a dilemma* on this, given its mandate to expose the public to a wide variety of views.
All the views fit to print. Including Rufo recently, I guess.
182: I don't think Fetterman would have won in Ohio
Almost certainly not. He did not even win western PA despite being from here and the shorts etc*. Based on my definition of "western" which is basically everything west of the Allegheny ridge (Altoona). He lost that by about 3%. Am going to look at Trump for the same area, but I think from looking at it in the past that part of PA was pretty close to Ohio in results.
In conclusion for all of Moby's unseemly electoral triumphalism vis-a-vis Ohio he lives in area just as politically shitty; only redeemed by arbitrarily being lumped in with the coastal elite on the far side of the Kittatinny Mountain. (The region between those two ridges is even more locked in to Rs.
Shapiro won western PA fairly easily. (Hoping Sherrod Brown continues as the Josh Shapiro of Ohio. (But I think Senate races these days are less driven by personalities and individuals--need Brown and Tester to buck that trend in '24.)
But the NYT publishes pieces by crazy conservatives. I'd completely understand the objection if Yglesias had Hanania guest blog for him. But instead he once responded to one piece he wrote (that wasn't about white supremacy) and when Hanania replied to one of Ygelesias's tweets he made a reply that said his comment was crazy. That's very different from the NYTimes publishing an op-ed by Tom Cotton!
Yeah. I'm very comfortable with reaping the benefits from something that happened without my involvement because it was determined before I was born.
Just did the analysis for 2020 and Trump would have won my definition of western PA by ~10%. So maybe Fetterman overperformed Ryan in Ohio. both of their opponents were ridiculous; but OZ may have seemed more so the general population.
Biden is a different case. He's trying to do things . . . [Yglesias doesn't face the dilemma based on a mandate to] expose the public to a wide variety of views
I don't think that's right. I think Yglesias is trying to do things (and he's written before about the news media's failure to see itself as a political actor), and I think he does feel a mandate to draw on a wide variety of views to inform his writing.
The question is that, compared to Biden (or the NYT), it's harder to define the value of what a pundit likes Yglesias does, and that makes it had to know how to weigh the value against the negative effects.
I think his style of punditry does have value, but I don't have a good way to assess that value.
202: It would be ungrateful not to.
199: This, again, makes sense to me. The generalizations about how normalizing Nazis is bad are hard to disagree with, but they also don't seem like a recognizable description of Yglesias's interactions with Hanania.
The difference between Ryan and Fetterman's vote is probably explained it taking longer for Ohio to learn about Roe being overruled.
202: It would be ungrateful not to.
I don't think I had two windows open.
Way back at 148: I don't know that older generation pundits like Tom Friedman or David Brooks have greater qualifications for expertise.
Once upon a time Friedman was an actual intrepid reporter, and as far as I can tell his book From Beirut to Jerusalem was both solidly researched and informative. But then he got a sinecure and got very rich (married a lot of money, too) and that was that.
Brooks, on the other hand, has been a liar and a fabulist from the get-go. In a just world, his career would have gone down in flames after Philadelphia magazine exposed his utter indifference to truth back in 2004. Sadly, no.
I've said it before, and I hope y'all will say it with me: Friends don't let friends read David Brooks.
Also 148: Also, it's funny to me that we're talking about Saiselgy as if he's just another pundit, not someone with a personal connection to Unfogged. Are there new commenters that don't know this history?
I've been wondering this too.
But I'm too sleepy and too full of Georgian food to try to figure out when he last commented here. Ezra, too.
212 was to 210 but it works for other comment numbers in this thread.
But I'm too sleepy and too full of Georgian food to try to figure out when he last commented here. Ezra, too.
Probably 2007 or so? He was never a prolific commenter here; it was more that there was a lot of overlap between his commenters and ours, including a lot of people who knew him personally.
215 was referring to Matt but it's true of Ezra too.
212 209 was to 210 but it works for other comment numbers in this thread.
There have even been comment threads in the past about whether Yglesias, Klein, and possibly others would ultimately end up in similar positions to long-established pundits. Very few pundits ever seem to retire, though. Maybe that's part of how they didn't end up becoming pure columnar writers.
Looks like the four warrants are for the three white men who started it - Roberts, Todd, and Shipman - plus the Black man who used the folding chair, Gray. Of the four, only Roberts, the oldest at 48, has turned himself in so far; he had a warrant pending for a different assault too. So no charges for co-captain Pickett, the originally assaulted man, thankfully.
The three white men are from Selma and apparently a few years ago went on the same co-captained riverboat, stole a golf cart from on board, and were found on video depositing it in the lobby of a Hampton Inn. "We were going to press charges then, but the police talked us out of it."
My sisters' (Dems in Pittsburgh) watchwords are 'Philly always saves us.' Wrong in 2016, but not bad as a rule of thumb for the state.
You can't disrespect the Hampton Inn and expect society to hold. It's not the Ramada Inn.
221: That's so much better news than I expected. That sounds well done.
Darb wrote about Hanania yesterday.
I kind of surprised that folks more online than me hadn't heard of him. I'm pretty sure I've seen quotes for a couple of years at least.
I followed the link from Darb and read a recent thing from Hanania. He acts like he's learned his lesson then shows he hasn't. He came to his prior bad opinions because the people he hates had opposite positions. He's been convinced on some things, but is still way too wound up in ad hominem thinking -- pretty much any use of woke or anti-woke is an indication of this -- to see that he's doing it again.
I heard of guys like that. It's just a type, the name doesn't stick.
I was late to the thread and was going to let it pass me by, 83 summed up my thoughts, but 191 got me back in - thanks. The context of "Yeah, you're a smart guy with interesting things to say but unfortunately also a crazy person imprisoned by this kind of tendency toward wild overstatement," makes it look worse, in my opinion.
This, again, makes sense to me. The generalizations about how normalizing Nazis is bad are hard to disagree with, but they also don't seem like a recognizable description of Yglesias's interactions with Hanania.
"Everything before the "but" is meant to be ignored by the speaker; and everything after the "but" should be ignored by the listener."
I don't know who Taleb is. The general sentiment is familiar to me and he's just the first source I found it attributed to. If Yglesias gives a statement like that in response to what he gave it in response to, it's strong evidence for the "useful idiot" label.