Should I Have Dunked on Matt Yglesias?

Last week, I had my first Bluesky post that got more than 1,000 likes. Should I care about that? Probably not! But for whatever reason (a fundamental character flaw or maybe unresolved issues from my childhood?), it felt like an achievement.

At the same time, I feel a little bad about how I did the achieving, because the post was a dunk on Matt Yglesias, and I've been trying to do less social media dunking. Too much negativity can be toxic and it would be good to be more positive in my posting.

Of course, there's an exception for Matt Stoller and Richard Hanania, and certain people in the Trump administration and other ideological opponents ("pro-natalists," for example), but I have been trying to limit the dunking to a fairly small group of people. Then Yglesias said something I found stupid and annoying, and I couldn't resist.

When I did the post, I wasn't expecting it to take off. It was an early morning post and I didn't put much thought into it. But then the great Sharon K. reposted it, and some really big accounts saw it and did so as well, and off it went. (At that point I panicked a bit and decided to look into the issue a little further, and added a couple clarifying posts).

While I enjoyed the unexpected engagement, I did wonder if I had strayed too far from my self-imposed dunking limits. I don't dislike Yglesias as much as many people seem to, and in the distant past he and I have had good exchanges on issues such as industrial policy. I think he's a pretty smart guy. But these days he does a lot of trolling, and his thoughts on political strategy often seem disconnected from reality. I'm not sure why anyone would take advice from him on questions such as "what should the Democrats do now." That makes him annoying at times, and I was kind of in the mood to be annoyed that morning anyway, so I took the easy dunk.

The question I struggle with here is, what are the limits? I still consider Stoller and Hanania to be fair game for dunking. These are people with whom I don't think it's possible or desirable to have a reasoned conversation on policy, politics, or probably much of anything, so I don't see the point in being polite to them. We don't have to be polite to everyone all the time!

As for Yglesias, it feels like he is right on the line. I know from past experience that I can have a good conversation with him, but these days that seems unlikely to happen. From time to time recently, I've made good faith efforts to get him to flesh out his views a bit more, but he hasn't responded.

So to answer the question I asked in the title of this piece, maybe I shouldn't have dunked on him, and I will probably try to resist in the future. At the same time, I will note that if you are a prominent commentator like Yglesias, you really should make an effort to say things precisely and accurately because you know everyone is watching everything you say closely. A lot of times it feels like he wants the dunking because "any attention is good attention" or something. But whether that's actually the case is a question that perhaps can only be answered by looking at his childhood, and I have no insights there.