I think my biggest problem with Gawkerism writ large (as a longtime Deadspin fanboy, frequent commenter, and much less frequent contributor) is that after the dismissiveness and wanking, they and the media ecosystem they created rarely get around to actual substance. OK, you've sufficiently ripped Yglesias and disproven his worldview and philosophy. Now tell me what you believe, and defend it as better than what you've mocked.
If a writer/outlet can't do that - either because they have no real thought or convictions beyond making fun of specific people, or because they're afraid to put their own thoughts up for the kind of public scrutiny they're dishing out - it's not worth any reader's time, money, or energy.
I think that the critique of Gawkerspeak in this article is largely correct, but the essay in question is too mediocre to really serve as an example. Gawkerspeak is often better as prose, and there are plenty of good lefty critiques of Yglesias and what he stands for.
Here the prose is terrible partly because the argument is half-baked: he's not an economist but he's completely sure that there'd be no political problem with minting the platinum coin because money is just made up, or something like that. He makes the rhetorical move of assuming his audience doesn't need to be persuaded of far-left position and that it also agrees that the far-left position is a political winner and that the only thing between us and utopia is spineless corrupt liberals. This is a bad way to talk about gender or policing, but it is especially annoying when applied to a technical economic matter the author doesn't know much about. One reason the article is so bad is that it was clearly written much too quickly - a funny problem in a critique of Matt Yglesias.
Yep, what's doubly hilarious is the guy is so busy mocking Yglesias that he misses the astute point Yglesias makes.
Yglesias is exploring other ideas because the platinum coin option cannot be done by the administration alone; it requires the cooperation of the Federal Reserve. The Fed has indicated it finds it inappropriate to get involved in a partisan disagreement outside its purview (as well as having concerns about the coin scheme's effect on inflation(.
So, the Fed it leaning it may (or likely would) reject the coin if the administration minted it and attempted to deposit it.
Yglesias is responding by trying to come up with other ideas. He wants to end this nonsense by empowering the administration, so it can break the GOP's leverage and end its ability to take this hostage.
The guy doesn't even get that's the project at work, that's why Yglesias is going way outside his areas of knowledge to try to brainstorm a new solution yo this issue.
That's also why the administration finds Yglesias so valuable and congressional staffers read him. Hr is clear-eyed here, focused on the goal of the administration, to give it a decisive win in this arena. He screwed up the math in this instance, but who cares; a score of finance professionals spotted and corrected the error almost immediately. It's still a sound theoretical approach to the problem - one worth exploring and attempting to develop further - and valuable in a way his smarmy critique never will be and doesn't even realize.
I agree with the underlying political economy the Deadspin guy is drawing on, but my candidate lost to Joe Biden. The serious “mint the coin” people see doing so as part of a radical Keynesian economic agenda, and that agenda just doesn’t have majority support in America. You can read serious writing on this subject in the New Left Review. I don’t expect Defector to read like Perry Anderson, but I can’t stand the idea that a vague, amorphous “left” position is just common sense.
I don’t think that you can simply blame the annoying Gawker style for any of this. Compared to other news-and-opinion websites Gawker was often very well written. At least you’d notice that they were trying to produce memorable prose, which is more than you can say for Yglesias or for most newspaper writers.
Your insight hit me in the comment section, in the lengthy discussion of exactly what version of right-winger Yglesias had become. They discussed multiple other pundits to situate Yglesias among them, concluding basically every mainstream Dem writer is center-right or right wing.
By the time they'd populated the entire political spectrum left-to-right with a group whose opinions comprised, what, 20% of prevailing public opinion? 30%?
This wasn't merely excluding far-right thinkers and purported neo-fascists from polite company, or shifting the Overton Window to exclude them.
These folks really perceived that they occupy a world whose mainstream politics ranges from Marxists to Ezra Klein. Everyone to the right of that (so what - 70% of voters? 80%?) was right-wing and could be dismissed without bothering to be engaged.
The actual "right" - seemingly everyone from David Brooks on - was dismissed as reactionaries; effectively something like 40% - 60% of voters was stuffed into a sliver of their spectrum like a tiny European splinter party with 5% Parliamentary support.
And all of the analysis was presented with absolute certainty and self-assurance. They took for granted both that they were right and everyone would agree with them - while spouting nonsense, soothing fictions utterly detached from reality, and misleading all of them.
Full disclosure: I like Yglesias, read his blog (the comments section is easily the best comments section in the internet right now, and the only one I regularly participate in), and generally am the sort of center-left liberal that it is trendy to bash these days. So that's my point of view.
While Yglesias does have a tendency to toss off poorly-considered opinions about random topics, and he is clearly not an expert on fiscal or monetary policy (as his bond math error shows)...I would bet good money that he knows more about the relevant issues in the debt ceiling debate than a random staffer from Defector who seems to just like the platinum coin idea because it's what Cool People Like Him on Twitter say is the thing to do. Really good money, actually.
Also, while Gawker 1.0 published some good writing here and there, it was mostly just the New York Post for the bougie hipster set. The nostalgia for it in media circles really grates on me. Deadspin was pretty good in the early days, though.
I don't write essays. My opinions on what's going on in the world, politically, wouldn't amount to a hill of beans. I'm old school. I'm an old man by todays standards, having just retired. When I saw the heading "Write seriously," it brought to mind the fiction stories I so love: serious writers published in literary journals. It brought to mind the writings of Alice Munro, and Mavis Gallant, and a dozen others out there from the enlightened past, who wrote about their past and brought it all to light. But would those stories written at the turn of the last century be published today? I doubt it. Is fiction writing here on Substack a dying art? Substack is a great platform for any writer trying to make a name for himself, or espousing opinions that he's free to expand upon, but fiction writers seem to fall to the wayside here. My question is why? I tend to write long fiction, stories of 12-17,000 words, where character and atmosphere bring the stories to light. The biggest problem with fiction writing today is that as society changes, writing is expected to change with it. How can you tell a story that takes place in the Deep South during the 1950s, and not use the "N" word? People are offended by the language in print, yet use it in their everyday speech. The world I grew up in, didn't espouse Political Correctness. I have no problems with PC, it's basic, common decency. But am I going to follow it in my stories? You can't look at the past through the lens of today. And that's the problem. Serious fiction--clear, concise, beautiful writing--holds a mirror up to the world and shows it for what it is, or was. At least with Substack, you can write without thinking you're offending today's readers.
It’s astonishing and disturbing how much of the political and cultural left now believes that depiction is endorsement. I’d expect that out of reactionaries and some conservatives but not the side artists are generally on.
Incidentally, this is why David Roth is the only one at Defector who can write compellingly about politics. The rest are solid when they are at least sports-adjacent, but good sociopolitical punditry requires a rigor of thought and prose style that most writers—including the ones on newspaper op-ed pages who write in the self-serious idiom that preceded Gawkerspeak—don’t possess.
Ross--my goal this week was to evaluate and cut any newsletters that I want to, but don’t actually read. Yours was on the cut list until today. This edition is exceptional and thank you for it.
I think my biggest problem with Gawkerism writ large (as a longtime Deadspin fanboy, frequent commenter, and much less frequent contributor) is that after the dismissiveness and wanking, they and the media ecosystem they created rarely get around to actual substance. OK, you've sufficiently ripped Yglesias and disproven his worldview and philosophy. Now tell me what you believe, and defend it as better than what you've mocked.
If a writer/outlet can't do that - either because they have no real thought or convictions beyond making fun of specific people, or because they're afraid to put their own thoughts up for the kind of public scrutiny they're dishing out - it's not worth any reader's time, money, or energy.
I think that the critique of Gawkerspeak in this article is largely correct, but the essay in question is too mediocre to really serve as an example. Gawkerspeak is often better as prose, and there are plenty of good lefty critiques of Yglesias and what he stands for.
Here the prose is terrible partly because the argument is half-baked: he's not an economist but he's completely sure that there'd be no political problem with minting the platinum coin because money is just made up, or something like that. He makes the rhetorical move of assuming his audience doesn't need to be persuaded of far-left position and that it also agrees that the far-left position is a political winner and that the only thing between us and utopia is spineless corrupt liberals. This is a bad way to talk about gender or policing, but it is especially annoying when applied to a technical economic matter the author doesn't know much about. One reason the article is so bad is that it was clearly written much too quickly - a funny problem in a critique of Matt Yglesias.
Yep, what's doubly hilarious is the guy is so busy mocking Yglesias that he misses the astute point Yglesias makes.
Yglesias is exploring other ideas because the platinum coin option cannot be done by the administration alone; it requires the cooperation of the Federal Reserve. The Fed has indicated it finds it inappropriate to get involved in a partisan disagreement outside its purview (as well as having concerns about the coin scheme's effect on inflation(.
So, the Fed it leaning it may (or likely would) reject the coin if the administration minted it and attempted to deposit it.
Yglesias is responding by trying to come up with other ideas. He wants to end this nonsense by empowering the administration, so it can break the GOP's leverage and end its ability to take this hostage.
The guy doesn't even get that's the project at work, that's why Yglesias is going way outside his areas of knowledge to try to brainstorm a new solution yo this issue.
That's also why the administration finds Yglesias so valuable and congressional staffers read him. Hr is clear-eyed here, focused on the goal of the administration, to give it a decisive win in this arena. He screwed up the math in this instance, but who cares; a score of finance professionals spotted and corrected the error almost immediately. It's still a sound theoretical approach to the problem - one worth exploring and attempting to develop further - and valuable in a way his smarmy critique never will be and doesn't even realize.
I agree with the underlying political economy the Deadspin guy is drawing on, but my candidate lost to Joe Biden. The serious “mint the coin” people see doing so as part of a radical Keynesian economic agenda, and that agenda just doesn’t have majority support in America. You can read serious writing on this subject in the New Left Review. I don’t expect Defector to read like Perry Anderson, but I can’t stand the idea that a vague, amorphous “left” position is just common sense.
I don’t think that you can simply blame the annoying Gawker style for any of this. Compared to other news-and-opinion websites Gawker was often very well written. At least you’d notice that they were trying to produce memorable prose, which is more than you can say for Yglesias or for most newspaper writers.
Interesting and perceptive.
Your insight hit me in the comment section, in the lengthy discussion of exactly what version of right-winger Yglesias had become. They discussed multiple other pundits to situate Yglesias among them, concluding basically every mainstream Dem writer is center-right or right wing.
By the time they'd populated the entire political spectrum left-to-right with a group whose opinions comprised, what, 20% of prevailing public opinion? 30%?
This wasn't merely excluding far-right thinkers and purported neo-fascists from polite company, or shifting the Overton Window to exclude them.
These folks really perceived that they occupy a world whose mainstream politics ranges from Marxists to Ezra Klein. Everyone to the right of that (so what - 70% of voters? 80%?) was right-wing and could be dismissed without bothering to be engaged.
The actual "right" - seemingly everyone from David Brooks on - was dismissed as reactionaries; effectively something like 40% - 60% of voters was stuffed into a sliver of their spectrum like a tiny European splinter party with 5% Parliamentary support.
And all of the analysis was presented with absolute certainty and self-assurance. They took for granted both that they were right and everyone would agree with them - while spouting nonsense, soothing fictions utterly detached from reality, and misleading all of them.
Full disclosure: I like Yglesias, read his blog (the comments section is easily the best comments section in the internet right now, and the only one I regularly participate in), and generally am the sort of center-left liberal that it is trendy to bash these days. So that's my point of view.
While Yglesias does have a tendency to toss off poorly-considered opinions about random topics, and he is clearly not an expert on fiscal or monetary policy (as his bond math error shows)...I would bet good money that he knows more about the relevant issues in the debt ceiling debate than a random staffer from Defector who seems to just like the platinum coin idea because it's what Cool People Like Him on Twitter say is the thing to do. Really good money, actually.
Also, while Gawker 1.0 published some good writing here and there, it was mostly just the New York Post for the bougie hipster set. The nostalgia for it in media circles really grates on me. Deadspin was pretty good in the early days, though.
I don't write essays. My opinions on what's going on in the world, politically, wouldn't amount to a hill of beans. I'm old school. I'm an old man by todays standards, having just retired. When I saw the heading "Write seriously," it brought to mind the fiction stories I so love: serious writers published in literary journals. It brought to mind the writings of Alice Munro, and Mavis Gallant, and a dozen others out there from the enlightened past, who wrote about their past and brought it all to light. But would those stories written at the turn of the last century be published today? I doubt it. Is fiction writing here on Substack a dying art? Substack is a great platform for any writer trying to make a name for himself, or espousing opinions that he's free to expand upon, but fiction writers seem to fall to the wayside here. My question is why? I tend to write long fiction, stories of 12-17,000 words, where character and atmosphere bring the stories to light. The biggest problem with fiction writing today is that as society changes, writing is expected to change with it. How can you tell a story that takes place in the Deep South during the 1950s, and not use the "N" word? People are offended by the language in print, yet use it in their everyday speech. The world I grew up in, didn't espouse Political Correctness. I have no problems with PC, it's basic, common decency. But am I going to follow it in my stories? You can't look at the past through the lens of today. And that's the problem. Serious fiction--clear, concise, beautiful writing--holds a mirror up to the world and shows it for what it is, or was. At least with Substack, you can write without thinking you're offending today's readers.
It’s astonishing and disturbing how much of the political and cultural left now believes that depiction is endorsement. I’d expect that out of reactionaries and some conservatives but not the side artists are generally on.
True that.
Really? This is what you are upset about?
If you stan Elizabeth Hardwick, then don't use "impact" as a verb--or, worse, a gerund.
Incidentally, this is why David Roth is the only one at Defector who can write compellingly about politics. The rest are solid when they are at least sports-adjacent, but good sociopolitical punditry requires a rigor of thought and prose style that most writers—including the ones on newspaper op-ed pages who write in the self-serious idiom that preceded Gawkerspeak—don’t possess.
Ross--my goal this week was to evaluate and cut any newsletters that I want to, but don’t actually read. Yours was on the cut list until today. This edition is exceptional and thank you for it.